The Christmas Cedar: An Appalachian Family Tradition

Before truckloads of perfect firs showed up in parking lots, Christmas trees in Appalachia came straight from the mountains themselves — usually a scrappy, sweet-smelling cedar growing stubborn as a mule on the hillside, the very heart of an Appalachian family Christmas tradition.

A week or so before Christmas, Daddy would holler, “Come on, young’uns — let’s go find us a tree!”

And just like that, the whole troop bundled up and headed toward the ridge, boots crunching frost-bitten leaves. Nobody went to “pick out” a tree — you went to hunt one. The mountains decided what you got.

Cedar wasn’t chosen because it was perfect. It was chosen because it was there — green through winter, smelling like heaven, and free as the wind.

Some of those cedars were lopsided. Some leaned like they were apologizin’. Some had bare spots big enough to throw a cat through. But when you’re a mountain kid, that didn’t matter. That was your tree — your holler’s Christmas.

Daddy would saw it down while the kids shivered and stomped their feet. Then came the real fun: dragging that prickly thing all the way back home. Those cedar needles didn’t just poke — they stabbed, and you’d be scratching your arms for two days. But the moment Mama opened the door and that cedar smell filled the house? Worth every battle wound.

Inside, Mama worked miracles. She’d turn that scraggly tree into something beautiful — popcorn garlands, paper snowflakes, maybe a string of cranberries if the store had ’em. The fire would crackle, and the whole house took on the scent of cedar, coal smoke, and Christmas hope.

Ask anybody who grew up in the mountains, and they’ll tell you this plain truth: No fancy tree

ever matched the magic of a wild cedar cut from your own ridge.

Because those trees weren’t just decorations. They were part of the land, part of the family, part of the season that reminded everyone — even in the hardest years — that there was still something green, something living, something worth celebrating.

And long after the needles dried and the branches dropped, the memory stayed: Daddy’s boots in the frost, Mama’s hands shaping beauty, and the whole family gathered around a cedar tree that smelled like the mountains themselves were wishing you a Merry Christmas.