Real or fake: Which kind of Christmas tree is best?

If you’ve moved into a new home, or this is your first holiday out on your own, it’s the perfect time to make a new tradition for yourself. But before you do, you've got to ask yourself: do you go for a real or artificial Christmas tree?

A common way this question gets framed is in terms of environmental impact. As it turns out, that’s the wrong focus—which tree you use accounts for less than 0.1% of your annual carbon emissions. There are responsible ways to use either kind of tree (which we’ll get into later), but in reality, whether you choose a real or artificial Christmas tree, the environmental effect will be less significant than deciding to carpool into work just once.

That being said, there are other, more tangible reasons to choose which tree is right for you this holiday season.

Pros and cons of a real Christmas tree

Pro: Some consider it a more authentic holiday experience

There’s a difference between setting up an artificial facsimile and bringing a living thing into your home that you need to nurture. The Christmas tree is often the centerpiece of the holiday, so the details do matter. Everything from the look and feel to the fresh scent of pine are impossible to replicate.

Con: They can be flammable

Part of a pine tree’s iconic scent comes from terpenes, which are inherently flammable. This is doubly true for dried-up live Christmas trees. Meanwhile, most modern artificial trees are much more fire-resistant.

Con: They’re high maintenance

Unless you want to celebrate Christmas around a brown and blighted husk of a tree, you’ll need to actively care for your new plant friend, whether it is cut or has roots. With pre-cut trees, the base of the trunk is already dried up and dead—make sure to cut about an inch off the bottom so it can absorb water. Once it’s in the Christmas tree stand, make sure to monitor the water level. A fresh cut tree can drink up to a gallon of water a day.

Also, getting a Christmas tree inside your home combines all the skills necessary for moving a full-size couch with the additional anxiety that bumping anything will scatter Yuletide debris across your floor, bread-crumbing its route from your car to your living room. If you manage to install the tree without losing 20% of its needles, it’s a Christmas miracle.

Those needles shed constantly, even if you’re taking great care of it (and significantly more so if you aren’t). You’ll need to sweep up after it on the daily to prevent build-up of flammable fragments (or get a robot vac to do it for you). There are certain trees including balsam firs and fraser firs that have longer needle retention.

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Pros and cons of an artificial Christmas tree

Pro: They’re convenient

Modern artificial trees can break down into many different parts, allowing you to easily move it around your home. When in storage, they can often condense down quite a lot, and you don’t need to water it or vacuum up pine needles.

Pro: They can cost less—at least over time

If you buy a high-quality artificial tree this year, it will likely be more expensive than a real tree. You will pay more up front compared to a real tree, even though the cost of real trees has been rising.

Where you start to save money is when you reuse your artificial tree in subsequent years. You can typically use an artificial tree for a decade, which is significantly more budget-friendly than purchasing a real tree each year (just make sure you recycle them when you're done).

The most high-end artificial Christmas trees from Balsam Hill cost around $1,000. If you’re spending $100 on a real Christmas tree every year, that investment will earn itself after 10 years.

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Pro: Decorating them is easier

Decorating your tree is easier with an artificial model, especially if you purchase a pre-lit tree with LED lights. This saves you time, since you don’t have to spend hours wrapping lights around branches. Plus with real trees, hanging lights and ornaments usually means lots of pine needles on the ground.

With an artificial tree, you won’t need to worry about needles littering the ground while you’re spreading yuletide joy.

Con: They can be subject to bad manufacturing processes

Like anything manufactured, artificial trees can sometimes be made on the cheap, which has a whole host of downsides. Make sure the tree you buy is flame-resistant or outright fireproof—lower-quality trees can indeed be quite flammable. Make sure user reviews don’t feature frequent complaints about the needles shedding constantly, because that simply means it’s not going to last a very long time, causing higher costs for you and the environment.

Con: They’re not always as good as the real thing

No artificial tree is going to have the look, smell, or feel of a real tree. It’s not a living thing. Whether or not that’s a dealbreaker is up to you.

Which kind of tree is more environmentally friendly?

Again, deciding to carpool once is a more important decision than which tree you use, but let's get into the nuance of which option results in the least environmental harm.

Assuming you purchase a tree from a Christmas tree farm where the trees are grown locally and responsibly, buying that tree will create the least harm to the environment.

The issue is, all of those qualifiers need to be true. If you get shipped to you or from a tree lot, and it wasn’t grown with sustainable farming practices, that could be enough to tip the scales. Also, if your city throws them in a landfill instead of recycling them, they’ll be producing methane for years.

For those who don’t have access to all that infrastructure, the more environmentally-conscious option might be a modern artificial tree. The key to artificial trees maintaining a lower carbon footprint is their ability to be reused, often for multiple decades.

Of course, when it comes time to dispose of your tree, you need to look for a local recycling program or ship it off to a second-hand store. Artificial trees are made from PVC, which is very costly to recycle and breaks down into various poisons when disposed of in a landfill.

Whether you choose a real or artificial Christmas tree, the most crucial step is ensuring you can properly recycle your tree. Failing to do so, is what will truly be bad for the environment.

Which option is right for you?

If you can get a locally-sourced, sustainably-farmed tree with intact roots (or you have a plan for recycling it), and you don’t mind lugging a giant tree from the curb to your living room and then caring for it during its stay, a live tree is probably the best way to go.

If you don’t want all that hassle (or don’t have access to tree recycling), and you pledge a solemn oath to use the same tree for years before recycling it, an artificial tree is a much simpler option. We even got a bunch of different highly-rated artificial trees to determine which of those were the best, if you want a good starting point.

Regardless of which option you choose, they’re both going to look great surrounded by friends, family, and gifts. So carpool into work a few times, pick your tree of choice, stock up on the best gifts, and enjoy your holiday.