Before You Buy a Christmas Tree, Can These Converts Sell You on a Fake?

By Alyson Krueger

The popularity of faux firs is soaring as the look becomes more convincing. But it isn’t necessarily good news for the environment.

Last year Charlene Truong Launer, a social media content creator, bought a real Christmas tree from a seller on a sidewalk in Manhattan.

Ms. Launer, 29, and her husband carried the tree 15 minutes to their apartment in TriBeCa and spent hours setting it up. “I was so excited,” she said.

The next morning, however, it all came crashing down — literally. “Our Christmas tree had toppled over, and all of our ornaments broke,” she said. “I was so devastated.”

They put it back together, but the tree headaches didn’t end there. “The whole time we had the tree the pine needles were all over the ground,” she said. Ms. Launer added that when it was time to toss the tree out, the collection team scattered pine needles everywhere after dragging the tree out of her apartment building.

She vowed never again.

Instead of shopping for a Christmas tree in person this year, she ordered a fake, nine-foot fir from Home Depot. “It arrived in a box, and I popped it open, and it was perfect,” she said. “It even came with lights.”

Ms. Launer considers herself a convert: “It looks really real,” she added. “I love it.”

She is hardly alone. According to polling by the American Christmas Tree Association, 77 percent of people who have at least one Christmas tree this year are going faux. The association found that people like how easy fake trees are to set up, that no maintenance is required, and that the trees look consistent and pretty throughout the holiday season.

Ben Frumin of Wirecutter, which is owned by The New York Times, said its guide to the best artificial Christmas trees was one of its most read product reviews last month — out of a catalog of more than 1,000 reviews.