With Christmas tree-buying season underway, Toomey's Boas Garden Center employees Jennifer Kasinecz and Dustin Pelletier prepare a tree for customer pickup.
It's called "choose and cut."
As in, choose your own Christmas tree from the many thousands of possibilities in the fields, and then get to cutting.
It's what the oodles of visitors to Frey's Evergreen Plantation, along Route 272 south of Willow Street, will be doing today rather than — or maybe after — heading out for Black Friday sales.
"That's what people really like doing … going out in the field and getting what they like," manager Barry Frey said earlier this week on a dreary, overcast day definitely not made for tromping through the fields searching for the perfect family Christmas tree.
There have been early sales to visitors so far this year, and sales are expected to pick up considerably today.
But "the real meat of the sales season for local people is the first and second weekend in December," their two busiest, Frey said.
Still, the later Thanksgiving this year has had more people on the hunt pre-turkey day for their own Douglas fir or blue spruce to string with lights and tinsel.
Some reported busier-than-normal sales leading up to Thanksgiving, and even in the struggling economy some are expecting this to be a good season for sales.
As Frey said, "Tree sales are usually sort of recession-proof. People will usually buy them regardless" of the economy.
Barb Sammet of Sammet's Christmas Tree Farm, 205 Skyview Lane, Lititz, agrees.
"One thing people don't want to compromise on is family tradition," she said.
And Jackie Bowser, an owner at Bowser's Christmas Tree Farm in Lititz, noticed that "people seem to want to go back to the traditional things.
"When they come in, they bring grandma, they bring the kids, they bring the dog … and it seems like the children want a real tree."
At Toomey's Boas Garden Center, 1501 Columbia Ave., a pair of Santas greet tree shoppers on the outside of the building, one wearing dark sunglasses and sitting on a motorcycle.
The garden center sold several trees Saturday and was ahead of that pace on Sunday.
So it seemed that "a lot of people wanted to come in and get an early start" for the center's first weekend of Christmas-tree sales, said salesman Dustin Pelletier.
"And there were a lot of first-time buyers, so they had plenty of questions," Pelletier said.
Bowser's Christmas tree farm at 551 Stauffer Road, Lititz, has 6,000 trees, which sounds like a lot but actually is far from Lancaster County's largest tree farm.
"We've been cutting trees all week," she said.
The farm's own work crews do the tree-cutting and had 125 tagged and ready for sale late Tuesday, everything at $7 a foot.
That's the same price as at Sammet's farm in Lititz, which sells all Douglas firs and blue spruce trees.
Bowser, who said tree-buyers "love it when it snows" because that gets them in the Christmas spirit, added that the weekend after Thanksgiving is traditionally busy. Last year, they sold close to 100 trees on that Friday and Saturday.
At Frey's, most of the early sales right now are to buyers from out of the area, visiting here for Thanksgiving.
They also sold a few trees this past Saturday and Sunday, Frey reported — one to a family with a serviceman deploying before Christmas, so they are having their Christmas early.
The weekend after Thanksgiving is usually the third-best at their 62-acre farm, Frey said. The first December weekend is traditionally the busiest, with the second December weekend the second-busiest.
"Those will be the real selling times," he said.
Nationally, as December approaches, some predict that buyers will see better Christmas-tree prices, as supply outstrips demand this holiday season.
According to one report out of Portland, Ore., record-high prices earlier this decade persuaded farmers to invest in Christmas trees, and it takes five to 10 years before trees are large enough for the living room.
"That means many of those plants are reaching maturity at a time when consumers are tight-fisted and enticed away by artificial trees," it said.
Oregon is the top state for Christmas tree production.
According to one wholesaler, Douglas firs now range from $10 for a 3-to-5-foot model to $60 for a 10-to-12-footer, while Fraser firs in those sizes range from $13 to $86 and blue spruce trees are going for $10 up to $50.