The Iowan Magazine November/December, 1999

Our Favorite Christmas Traditions

Here what Chuck Offenberger, former "Iowa Boy" columnist for the Des Moines Register and now an "Iowan Magazine" columnist and Writer-in-Residence at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa has to say about Aldrich Tree Farm.
“It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas,” as the late, great Meredith Wilson, a loyal son of Mason City, wrote in his famous holiday carol. When we think of Christmas in Iowa, we think of a hundred or more wonderful traditions we've heard about that happen on farms, in rural churches, in small towns, and in our cities. This season we want to tell you about some of the best ones.

Oh, Chrismas Tree

The Aldrich Tree Farm, south of Belmond in north central Iowa, has one of the most fun and busiest Christmas tree growing and cutting operations in the state. The farm, founded in 1883, has always been a typically Iowa corn-beans-hogs operation, but with a strange 24-acre sand hill in the middle of it, left there eons ago by the glacier.

Lee Aldrich, 57 says his father told him in 1968 “to try to figure out something good to do with that hill because it wasn't much good for growing corn.” Someone suggested raising Christmas trees on it, and Lee and his wife Lynne planted their first trees in 1969. Seven years later, they sold trees for the first time. They now sell 1,200 per year, nearly half of them on their three-day opening weekend after Thanksgiving. The Aldriches’ three grown sons and their families come home to help them, as do some neighbors and high school students who are hired. People come from all over the north half of the state to drive in among the Aldrich trees and find just the perfect one for their home. Most saw down their tree; then it's hauled back near the barn where it is mechanically shaken to rid it of loose needles, then bundled and tied to the cars.
Inside that barn, on the first weekend of the season, local artists and crafters sell their work. Christmas music is playing, and customers browse while munching ten-cent popcorn and drinking free cider and coffee. You can also buy a variety of Aldrich-made wreaths and special “crooked-trunk-correcting” tree stands.

Customers know they're getting close to the farm, which is five miles south of Belmond and one mile east, when they start seeing the “Burma Shave” signs with verses like this: “Slow down, Pa!/ Sakes alive!/ Ma wants a tree/ For $19.95

The Aldriches still raise hogs, too. When I started renting from Dad way back in 1968, he said, "I have some advice for you: When the last hog leaves this farm, so do you."

You know, I believe that old tiger meant it” But you also know how the hog market has been the last couple of years. Even through many pork producers have liquidated their operations, Lee Aldrich has kept at least a few hogs at all times. Last Christmas he said that in his anguish over the lousy hog markets, he missed out on what might have been a great advertising line for his tree farm. “After we’d already run all our ads and started selling trees,”: he says, “one customer suggested we should have had a slogan of ‘Aldrich Tree Farm, $20 gets you a Christmas tree or a pig--your choice!’”