By Stacy Nguyen
Northwest Asian Weekly
I was sitting in an editorial meeting a month ago, brainstorming cool holiday-theme content we can run in the paper that isn’t the same ol’ same ol’. I made a comment about how I should write an article about how Asians hate real Christmas trees. Most people were like, huh? Asians hate real trees? And I was like, yeah, man!
And Ruth, Northwest Asian Weekly’s editor, was like, “I love this idea! Are you serious, though?”
Yes. I am serious.
Methodology
I put up two really informal Instagram story polls because it’s easy to vote and it’s also easy to disseminate how people vote.
One poll was for white people, and one was for Asians. In both polls, I asked people to please only answer the poll that aligns with their racial background. Even though I felt I was pretty clear, people made a mess of the polls. White people were answering the Asian poll, and Asian people were answering the white poll. So I had to go back and clean up the data.
So after scrubbing through the results, these are the numbers:
So, 92 people took my polls — 40 Asian/Pacific Islanders (APIs) and 52 white people. More than half — about 54 percent — of white people who are friends of mine say that they put up a real Christmas tree. In contrast to this, only 20 percent of APIs put up real Christmas trees.
Asians ain’t about real trees, not even Filipino/as
If you’re an Asian American who celebrates Christmas, I’d guess that you or your parents learned about commercialized Christmas from white friends.
Or you hail from the 2 to 4 percent Christian minority in most Asian countries. Or maybe you celebrate Christmas because you are Filipino/a and are from a country that has a serious Catholic population.
Even so, being Filipino doesn’t at all correlate to a love of live Christmas trees. (It makes sense. Catholicism doesn’t have that much to do with Santa Claus, and real pine trees seem hard to come by in the Philippines.)
Neal Capapas is Filipino American and is an Operations Support Program Manager at Rainier Valley Corps. Capapas’ parents moved to New York from the Philippines in 1986 and the family eventually settled in the Midwest.
“I went to a high school where we were all fairly privileged,” said Capapas.
“But I still noticed that the only people who had real trees up were my white friends. And very real trees,” he stressed. “These were not small trees. These were very large eight-, nine-foot objects.”
William Yee, a local chef who is also Filipino American, initially told me that he puts up a real tree each year. And then he clarified. He said, “I only answered real tree [in your poll] because my white boyfriend of 15 years refuses to get a fake tree. I miss spraying on the pine smell.”
An issue of cost
The National Christmas Tree Association (NCTA) sent out a consumer survey between Jan. 9 and Jan. 11, 2018. This survey of 2,086 respondents was balanced so that it reflects the age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, geographical region, and household income of the U.S. population. From the data, the NCTA found that 27.4 million real Christmas trees were purchased in 2017, and 21.1 million fake trees were purchased in the same time period.
The average cost of a real tree in 2017 was $75. Keep in mind, that is average. Trees can cost $20 to $30 a foot. A really nice tree might steal $180 out of wallets.
Because Christmas trees, which are specifically grown on Christmas tree farms for the holidays (so like, people aren’t going out and chopping down forest trees en masse), take 10 years to mature, the high cost of real trees actually stems from the 2008 recession. Ten years ago, Christmas felt pretty bleak because people were experiencing the greatest financial hit since the Great Depression. In response, tree growers planted fewer trees, not anticipating that a decade into the future, people would be all like, “Why is this tree so expensive!”
The high cost of real Christmas trees may be why there has been an uptick in the purchase of fake trees. Fake trees can be exorbitant, just like anything else. But they can also be $20. Which is what my three-foot tree costs.
I hate to paint with a broad brush — but I think price matters to APIs. I think the cost and value of things matter to people who are recent immigrants to this country. The idea of spending Benjamins during a holiday that is not a cultural or religious holiday (for APIs), but more a social one — on a tree that will continue to die is like, totally crazy to a first generation American and immigrant. It’s like asking them to throw money down the toilet — and then asking them to do chores on top of it, like going out and buying a dead plant that they have to drag into their house for a month, watering it all the time, before they have to drag that dead plant out and throw it away somehow — every year.
My Vietnamese mother, Tammy Nguyen, is the original gangsta of my life, so she is where all of my Christmas habits come from. She’s the reason I hate real trees. This is basically how prejudice starts. Your parent just spews a bunch of hate without giving really logical reasons for it, and before you know it, you have internalized it, and you are spewing out the same hate — you are sneering in disgust when you go to a friend’s house and they have a real tree up. You’re like, “What’s that smell? Why are there pine needles all over the floor?”
I recently chatted with my mom about this. I was like, “Mom, how come you don’t like real Christmas trees?”
She was like, “Costs money every year. Then after the holiday, we have to dispose of it. A lot of work.”
And then I was like, “Do you know any Vietnamese people who have real trees?”
She was like, “No.”
White people own nature
So fun fact: My mom was mistaken and she actually does know Vietnamese people who have real trees — my Auntie Chi Le and my cousins, Julie Nguyen and Juliet Le.
Nguyen is co-owner of a furniture store. She shocked me by admitting that her family puts up a real tree. After I gasped and was like, “Why!?” she was like, “Because it smells nice. And it’s fun to go pick out as a family.” She did admit that she grew up with fake trees — which lines up with what I remember. She said this switch to real trees happened only about five years ago. She jokingly said, “We wanted to follow the white people tradition.”
It’s interesting how the APIs I talked to aligned a real Christmas tree with whiteness. Whiteness is obviously broad, but in this context, I think to APIs, whiteness in a more pejorative sense represents wealth, excess, and sentimentality. Nguyen started a new tradition with her family — getting a real tree every year — and along with this practice comes a sense of treating one’s self, of being a little self-indulgent.
Melanie Johnson, a white woman who is currently pursuing a post-graduate degree, told me that she’d prefer a real Christmas tree ideally, but because she is currently limited in funds, worried about fire hazards, and has been moving apartments, she can’t put up a real tree this year.
She also said that the appeal of real trees for people with her background (white) is the idealization and notion of what the tree represents. She pointed out that maybe because, compared to newer immigrants, white Americans do not have the same depth in cultural traditions, so they tend to make up their own traditions. She speculated that maybe this is why a lot of white people that she knows likes to go and chop down their own tree.
She jokingly said, “A lot of white people like Charlie Brown. Maybe it’s a Charlie Brown thing.”
Melanie also insightfully said people with her background also like “authenticity.” She put scare quotes around that word.
There’s a fact of life — and that is certain kinds of authenticity feels reserved for white people. One kind is nature.
It’s also notable that in this country, we have a history of aligning nature and wide open idyllic spaces to whiteness and erasing people of color from that narrative, even though people of color, particular Black people and indigenous people, have occupied rural areas and have worked and lived on the land.
When early Europeans arrived to what is now the United States, they started claiming this land and with that terrible effort, they created this complex rhetoric that we are still internalizing — which is that nature and the wilderness needs to be conquered, then contained, and then conserved.
The domestication of nature and the erasure through colonization of people of color from this space is probably something that all of us are at least subconsciously aware of.
Like, sometimes people of color get really weird when you suggest they go camping. They’re like, oh, hell no to that. And they give you a bunch of reasons why they do not like nature. Sometimes they forget to tell you that subconsciously, it’s because they know nature is so white, and they don’t feel like they belong in whiteness.
I think this is why some of us also get a little weird about live Christmas trees.
Straight up sentimental
Through talking with a bunch of people about how they feel about Christmas trees, I discovered that it all boils down to how we feel about this holiday. What I’m trying to say is that, across the board, whether you hate real Christmas trees for bogus reasons or whether you really love them because you are a bag of feelings — the way many of us feel about Christmas trees is a bit irrational and emotional and totally based on the context in which we grew up.
Jordan Heathcoat, who is white and does marketing work, grew up in Arizona among a bunch of hippie progressives. This is why she grew up with a fake Christmas Saguaro cactus and — one year — a decorated Christmas tumbleweed. Beyond these offshoots though, she always had a real tree growing up.
As an adult, she’s had a combination of real and fake trees over the years. “I still prefer real ones,” she said. “Real trees smell amazing and have a sense of nostalgia attached to them. That nostalgia comes both from a childhood of growing up with real trees, and a completely unrealistic idea of what Christmas should look like based on a lifetime of watching Christmas movies.”
In contrast to this, my mom — who professed to hate the work that a real tree requires — puts up a 12-foot fake Christmas tree every year that smells like nothing. She drags it out of the storage space by herself because none of her kids want to help her because it is so much work to put up a 12-foot fake tree. She likes doing it because it looks pretty, and it makes her feel good to see something in her house that looks pretty.
Stacy Nguyen can be reached at stacy@nwasianweekly.com.