Christmas In The United States Of America

Tradition Of Having Xmas Trees

In 1851, a Mark Carr hauled two sleds with trees from the Catskill Mountains and marketed them in New York, the first recorded Christmas tree lot in the United States. Towards the 1890s, the Catskills supplied the New York area with over 200,000 trees every year!

Andrew Jackson, the first president of the United States, was photographed with a Christmas tree in 1835. This tree, though, was a little sugar-frosted pine. When Franklin Pierce was president in 1856, he put up the first Christmas tree in the White House.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, many people began to have trees in their homes, and towns began to have shared illuminated trees. Then, Grover Cleveland was the first to use electric lights on a tree at the White House in 1895.

Calvin Coolidge initiated the custom of placing a tree on the White House lawn in 1923. The trees popped up everywhere. There were trees in San Diego in 1904, Pasadena in 1909, New York, Boston, and Cleveland in 1912, and Philadelphia in 1914.

In 1880, Frank Woolworth began to sell glass decorations in his store. The Sears catalog began selling decorations by mail order in 1910. Among all the holiday celebrations, the tallest cut Christmas tree, as per Guinness World Records, was a 67.36m (221 ft) Douglas fir put up in December 1950 at the Northgate Shopping Center in Seattle Washington, USA.