By Theresa Opeka
Carolina Journal
For the second year in a row, a North Carolina Christmas tree farm was chosen to have one of its trees appear in the Blue Room of the White House this Christmas.
It also marks the sixteenth time a tree from the Tar Heel State was chosen as the official Christmas tree for the White House, more than any other state in the nation.
White House staff, including Dale Haney, White House grounds superintendent, and Blair Downey, White House chief usher, were on hand Monday to pick the Fraser Fir from Cartner’s Christmas Tree Farm, of Newland, in Avery County. The tree is twenty-five-years-old, 20 feet tall, and 12 feet wide.
Cartner’s Christmas Tree Farm was named the 2024 Grand Champion Grower at the 2023 National Christmas Tree Association’s National Christmas Tree and Wreath Contest in August 2023, alongside the 2023 Grand Champion Grower, Cline Church Nursery, Fleetwood, Ashe County.
The Association holds a contest every two years in which consumers, industry experts, and growers choose which nurseries will provide trees for the White House and the vice president’s official residence, continuing a 59-year-old tradition.
Tree farmers first compete on a state level before being invited to compete nationally. Farmers compete against about thirty trees or more, which go through two rounds of judging before being narrowed down to the top two or three trees, which are then voted on again for the top spot.
In a recent phone interview, Sam Cartner told Carolina Journal that his family was very pleased and humbled by the honor.
“It gives us a lot of notoriety, and we’re really proud of our trees in North Carolina,” he said. “It’s just not about Cartner’s. It’s about Frasier Firs, raised in western North Carolina.”
In addition to this honor, the Cartner Christmas Tree Farm has won a local competition and has delivered trees to the governor’s mansion.
Founded in 1959 by his parents, Sam and Margaret, Cartner told CJ that his dad was a North Carolina agricultural extension agent in western North Carolina and was a strong proponent for family farms.
“During the (19)50s, people were raising row crops like tobacco, beans, and potatoes, and dad had promoted Christmas trees as a better cash crop,” he said. “It really took on here in western North Carolina because Frasier Firs are native to this area, and you can’t grow Frasers in a lot of places, and they have great characteristics of needle retention and color and fragrance and needles that are soft but the limbs firm enough to hold ornaments, so it’s a great species to grow. It’s the number two money producer behind tourism in this region.”
In addition to Sam, who was a veterinarian at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, his brothers, Jim, also a veterinarian in Statesville, and David, an attorney in Asheville, took over managing the farm in the 1990s. While David and Jim still have a hand in the business, Sam has managed it for the last three years.
He said having a Christmas tree farm has been a great experience for them and many other families in the area who also have one.
“Christmas trees have put a lot of people in this area through school and help pay off debt and things like that, so Christmas trees have been a real godsend to us,” Cartner said.
While their main business is wholesale, selling trees throughout the eastern US, they also have a choose-and-cut operation, with generations of families returning year after year. Some have even had wedding proposals and their weddings on the farm.
Those same customers, or friends, as Sam calls them, called to check on how they were doing after Helene hit the area.
“I can’t tell you how many customers have called and asked how we did through the flood and the hurricane just to check on us, and it’s really a great feeling to have friends as customers and a relationship like that,” he told CJ.
While, thankfully, no lives or buildings were lost, 5-6,000 trees under 4 feet were lost to mudslides. These were not market-size trees but 10% of their future harvest.
Explaining the growth process, Cartner said that once a seedling grows to about eight to twelve inches, it goes into a field and grows about a foot a year. So, an eight-foot tree has been in the field for eight years, and before that, it was in a seedbed for five, so an eight-foot tree is thirteen years old.
In addition to the tree farm, the family has four houses for vacation rentals on Airbnb.
After the tree is harvested on Nov. 20, it will be brought to the Mountain Glen Country Club from 10am- 2pm for a community event benefiting flood victims.
Cartner has high praise for the temporary workers from Mexico who help not only on their farm but also in the agriculture industry across the US.
“I want to say how wonderful that program is, and without that, not just Christmas trees but the whole agricultural industry in the United States would not be what it is without them,” he said. “They are wonderful people, and we treat them as part of the family. As long as I can remember, even though we are always working on Thanksgiving Day, we would take chickens and turkeys already cooked to the men, and that is always fun to do.”
North Carolina produces about 25%, or 6 million, of the 25 million Christmas trees sold in America each year, second only to Oregon. Ninety-six percent of the trees in NC are Fraser Fir.
“If we’re selling that many with the wholesale average of $50, you can figure out what that means to North Carolina in the way of income,” Cartner said. “The 6 million trees that are going to be cut out of four or five counties in the next three to four weeks is just mind-blowing. Every truck holds about 500 trees, so how many tractor trailers leaving these small counties up here is crazy. You never really stop to think about that, but that is amazing, it’s definitely important, and people enjoy it every year.”
The Cartners will present the tree to First Lady Jill Biden at the White House on Nov. 25.
Theresa Opeka is the Executive Branch reporter for the Carolina Journal.
