PHOENIX — Christmas is coming up and if you’re looking to get a real Christmas tree this year, you might have to act fast as taller trees are harder to get than others.
Ryan Wagner co-owns Wagner Christmas Trees in Scottsdale with his wife. They’ve been in business for five years; but it’s been a family legacy for 60 years.
“Families are coming back to having like a real Christmas experience,” Wagner said. “That smell that you get, the family memory of coming to a Christmas tree lot, shopping local and actually picking out a tree with your kids and with your family is getting much more important."
Wagner is expecting to sell 1,200 to 2,000 trees this year and the trees that sell the fastest are the biggest. Specifically, the ones in the 9+ foot club.
“We're in Scottsdale. We have homes that are 16-20 ft ceilings,” he said. “They're looking for the larger trees and when I can't offer a nine-foot tree, for example, or I have very limited supply. I sell out like that.”
The trees take years to grow. 15-foot trees could take up to two decades to grow. Wagner gets most of his from his uncle’s farm in Oregon. However, taller trees are in short supply all over the country.
Most Christmas tree farms buy their inventory from two hubs: the Pacific Northwest and North Carolina, Wagner stated. About five to six years ago, the West Coast experienced many wildfires and a drought that prevented new trees from being planted, and Arizona is feeling the effects.
“This happened five, six, seven years ago, it just creates these shortages, especially with different sizes,” Wagner added. “This year, I don't have a single tree that was like an eight-to-nine-foot tree. I could get some seven to eight feet, I can get some nine to tens, but that certain height just wasn't available.”
Wagner also gets a lot of trees that are good for the desert climate from Asheville, North Carolina, but Hurricane Helene took out a lot of the supply, so he could only buy half.
“I would love to be able to buy more of them, because it happens every single year,” Wagner said. “People come to me the second week, first week of December and I'm not able to get them a tree because I no longer have a 12-foot tree available.”
He still has plenty of trees to sell, ranging from two to 15-foot trees, with the most he has in stock being seven or nine-footers. But his stock of large trees was already half gone by this time last week and they opened about a week and a half ago.
With higher demand that usually means higher prices, however, that’s not a part of the Wagner plan.
“I do this as a legacy to my father,” Wagner proclaimed. “I'm doing it more for the experience to share with the community. We don't have surge pricing.”
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