The Outline:
For the Christmas tree vendors of Gopher Broke Farms, the day begins at 8 p.m. when a truck from Quebec carrying upwards of 800 Christmas trees will roll up to the corner of 124th and Madison. A crew of five workers will scamper to the top of the large piles of Fraser firs and balsams and begin slangin’ trees — tree-vendor slang for throwing trees, essentially — from that truck into other trucks destined to travel throughout Manhattan. “Tree!” the workers shout as they throw them from the seemingly endless pile.
Selling Christmas trees is a wildly logistical process, involving growers in Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Vermont.
As a native son of a province that is one of the largest Christmas tree suppliers, I love these stories of how the tree gets from that farm in Nova Scotia, Quebec or Vermont to the streets and parking lots of your hometown.
Manhattan tree vendors are one of the few remaining good street-level things about the city that still resemble the Manhattan of my earlier decades.