The Koupal family Christmas tree, 2024.

For decades, my husband and I bought our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving from a local lot. Charitable and commercial tree stands dotted the main streets of Pierre and Fort Pierre, South Dakota, and the local nurseries carried them as well. Because of rising costs and the growing use of artificial trees, the tree stands have begun to disappear, the local tree farm cannot supply the community’s need, and the nurseries no longer find the trees profitable. If you do not have one by Thanksgiving, you are in danger of not getting a real tree at all. The last few years, we have spent Thanksgiving in Arizona with our children and grandchildren, returning the week after to embark on the Great Tree Hunt. This year, after what seemed a futile search, we contemplated the tradition-breaking possibility of buying an artificial tree until we found five stragglers—and straggly they were—at the hardware store. We were hanging the lights and a few decorations on our tiny but lush-smelling white pine when it occurred to me that trees in the home were not part of the Ingalls family tradition while Laura Ingalls Wilder was growing up.

The first Christmas tree that Wilder remembered seeing was an “artificial” one in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, in 1874. The winter weather had been mild, Wilder recalled, so the Ingalls family went into town to the church celebration that year.¹ Along with singing and other programming, the event featured a community Christmas tree, “the first we had ever seen. . . . all decorated with colored paper and little bags of candy and candles.” Most likely, given the location, the “tree” was a wooden pyramid or coat rack construction of some kind, although it could have been a leafless deciduous tree cut down for the occasion. People “had given each other presents of things that were needed,” Wilder explained in her autobiography, such as washboards, shoes, boots, and mittens. A church in the East had also “sent a barrel of toys and clothing,” and from this barrel, Wilder received a “a little fur collar or tippet, to keep my throat warm.”²

“The little fur cape and muff still hung on the tree.” Helen Sewell’s illustration of the Christmas tree in On the Banks of Plum Creek, 1937.

Wilder elaborated on these memories in By the Banks of Plum Creek, describing what she decided “must be a tree. She could see its trunk and branches. . . . Where leaves would be in summer, there were clusters and streamers of thin green paper. Thick among them hung little sacks made of pink mosquito-bar.” The branches were also draped with mittens and shoes and the coveted fur cape and matching muff. Washboards, churns, and sleighs lay underneath. “That is a Christmas tree, girls,” Ma said. “Do you think it’s pretty?” (Plum Creek, pp. 251–52). Mary and Laura were speechless at the sight as church members and Sunday School teachers began to bring them gifts from the tree. Grace Ingalls experienced her first Christmas tree at a De Smet, Dakota Territory, church event a few years later. By that time such trees had become standardized, with “lighted candles shining, the bright-colored mosquito-bar bags of candy and the presents hanging from the branches.” They had not lost their capacity to surprise, and Laura was again rendered speechless when she received “a small black leather case lined with blue silk,” against which shone, “all white, an ivory-backed hairbrush and comb.” Pa told her that he had seen Almanzo Wilder “‘buying that very case in Bradley’s drugstore,’ and he smiled at Laura’s astonishment” (These Happy Golden Years, p. 146).

The Mons and Bertha Tystad family Christmas, near Kyle, South Dakota, 1950.

The community tree events that the Ingalls family attended were part of the slow introduction of Christmas trees to America. The tradition of evergreens displayed in family homes, as we know it today, originated in Germany in the sixteenth century, but the Puritans were slow to adopt what they considered a pagan symbol. When Queen Victoria and her family appeared around a decorated evergreen in the illustrated news of 1846, the Christmas tree became fashionable in Britain and spread to the United States, with communal trees being some of the first to appear.³ By the 1890s, evergreens began to show up in family photographs of Christmas, ornamented with popcorn strings and presents. By the 1930s, in-home Christmas trees had become so popular that thieves were cutting down Wilder’s favorite cedars on Rocky Ridge Farm for that purpose.⁴ Even so, Christmas trees may have remained more of a community event than an in-home tradition for Wilder. As late as December 1937, she attended a holiday celebration in a neighbor’s home for which she and Almanzo provided the tree and “the filled cheesecloth bags of Christmas candy to hang thickly all over it. . . . Everyone had several presents and the kids had a grand time.”⁵

Nancy Tystad Koupal in front of the family Christmas tree in Mitchell, South Dakota, 1954.

By the1950s when I was growing up, the evergreen was a long-established part of family holiday celebrations. The dangerous candles of earlier years had given way to strings of electric lights that allowed the trees to shine brightly from Thanksgiving to New Years. While artificial trees seem to be replacing firs or pines in many family traditions and in many public places, in my view, they cannot compete with the smell and look of the evergreen.

Merry Christmas from my house to yours.

–Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. The Union Congregational Church of Walnut Grove, founded in 1874, held an elaborate Christmas celebration that same year. By 1879, the holiday tree was an established practice that included entertainment, “exercises,” and singing. “Walnut Station Items,” Redwood (Minn.) Gazette, Jan. 2, 1879.
2. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. Pamela Smith Hill (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), p. 74.
3. “History of Christmas Trees,” Dec. 9, 2024, http://www.history.com.
4. Wilder to Rose Wilder Lane, Jan. 25, 1938, in The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, ed. William Anderson (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016), pp. 149–50.
5. Wilder to Lane, Dec. 29, 1937, ibid., p. 140. This letter suggests that Lane hosted a similar event at Rocky Ridge Farmhouse during her stay there.