HISTORY AT A GLANCE

The following story is from the Journal's Mason County Visitor's Guide for 1968.

The bright lights on trees from Mason County pop the eyes of boys and girls in 2 million homes every year on Christmas morning. Christmas trees produced here are shipped as far south as Mexico City, east to Kansas and west to the Philippines. California gets 80 percent of the crop.

That's why Shelton has earned its unique nickname of "Christmastown U.S.A." This is the place where Santa stops to load his sleigh with fragrant, feathery green firs and pines grown for the purpose of making Christmas merry for millions.

Mason County is the leading producer in Washington and Oregon of high-quality Christmas trees grown by scientific methods on sustained yield tree farms. The county has an estimated 80,000 acres in tree farms ranging in size from 20 to 20,000 acres. The wholesale value of the crop at Shelton is estimated at between $2 and $3 million a year by Fred Peste, production manager of the Douglas Fir Christmas Tree Company, one of the larger operators.

Today's holiday tree market demands quality, and successful tree growers aim for a product with buyer appeal, which is defined as trees that are dense, uniform, dark green in color, with fresh green foliage and a well-balanced crown of evenly spaced whorls that sweep gently upward. In order to get this quality, Mason County growers during the past 30 years have developed elaborate techniques for cultivating, fertilizing, harvesting and marketing. Washington State University specialists aid the industry with marketing analyses and developing methods to control pests and improve shipping.

Harvesting begins about the second week in November and continues until Dec. 15. A small army of men and women move into the trees farms and the concentration yards where trees are graded, processed, and loaded for shipment by truck or boxcar.

The crews are working against time in order to hit the market, so it's a high-speed operation all down the line, from the sites where the trees are cut to the ordered confusion of the yards, where the graders are chanting their verdicts and the cut-off saws are whining.

The Christmas tree harvesting operation provides seasonal employment to about 1,000 Mason County workers, who average $20 a day in wages. In good years, this pumps about $420,000 a day for six weeks into the local economy. And all this humming activity, from the time the tiny fir seedling goes into the ground until the final roar of the big semis pulling out with their loads is incidental to providing Christmas joy for a few million kids, and grownups, too.

■ Jan Parker is a researcher for the Mason County Historical Museum. She can be reached at [email protected]. Membership in the Mason County Historical Society is $25 per year. For a limited time, new members will receive a free copy of the book "Shelton, the First Century Plus Ten."