The 5 Best Artificial Christmas Trees | Reviews by Wirecutter

Oct 16, 2024

By Tim Heffernan

Tim Heffernan is a writer who covers air and water quality and sustainable-energy technology. He prefers Flare-brand match smoke for purifier testing.

We are re-evaluating our recommendations and planning new tests in 2024 on a Grandin Road Classic Slim and an unlit Balsam Hill Classic Blue Spruce. We have moved two picks to the competition.

We’ve set up enough artificial Christmas trees to know that there’s no single best artificial tree. They come in dozens of species, shapes, sizes, prices, lighting options, and levels of realism. Some are exuberant in their artificiality—who but a Scrooge wouldn’t smile at a flamingo-pink tinsel tree?

With care, decoration, and attention to detail, many of them can look beautiful. But we have to start somewhere, and among the 20-plus trees we’ve tried since 2016, National Tree Company’s 7.5-foot Feel Real Downswept Douglas Fir is the attractive, realistic, versatile, and competitively priced option we recommend first.

Realistic, full, generously sized, and versatile, this LED-lit tree can switch between all-white and multicolor modes, and the lights connect as you put the sections together.

(with free Echo Pop and smart plug)

Offering exceptional realism, Puleo’s Royal Majestic Douglas Fir comes with warm, clear incandescent lights—the kind that keep working even if one bulb goes out.

In addition to having realistic needles, the King Noble is also flocked—covered in artificial snow. It’s lovely, especially set against a dark nighttime window or in an unlit corner.

Reminiscent of the aluminum trees of the mid-century modern era, this tree has shiny tinsel “needles” that offer a cheerful and charming sparkle.

Trees like this Puleo offering, with a sparser, shaggier look, are trendy, and the larger gaps between their branches make it easier to hang and show off ornaments.

Realistic, full, generously sized, and versatile, this LED-lit tree can switch between all-white and multicolor modes, and the lights connect as you put the sections together.

(with free Echo Pop and smart plug)

Compared with both pricier and cheaper trees, National Tree Company’s 7.5-foot Feel Real Downswept Douglas Fir strikes a terrific balance of cost, realism, and ease of setup. Its nearly 2,000 lifelike polyethylene branch tips create a convincing illusion of a living tree, and its 750 pre-strung LED bulbs fill the branches with light. They can also switch from all white to multicolor to a mix of the two, giving the tree uncommon versatility. While some trees require you to hunt down the light strings’ plugs among the foliage and manually connect them, the Downswept Douglas’s trunk-mounted PowerConnect system automatically does the job for you when you stack its three sections together. At 7.5 feet high and almost 5 feet across, the tree will fill the corner of almost any living room. Finally, it’s widely available, easy to set up, and competitively priced. (For smaller homes, we recommend the 6.5-foot version.) Like all artificial trees, it takes up a chunk of storage space in the offseason, even when it’s disassembled.

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Offering exceptional realism, Puleo’s Royal Majestic Douglas Fir comes with warm, clear incandescent lights—the kind that keep working even if one bulb goes out.

Right out of the box, without any of the branch fluffing that all artificial trees require, Puleo’s 7.5-foot Royal Majestic Douglas Fir Downswept Tree appeared so lifelike that a staff writer walking by commented, “It looks like a real tree.” Puleo augments its realistic polyethylene branch tips with subtle color variations—such as lighter-green ends to simulate new growth—thereby creating one of the most convincing illusions we’ve seen on any artificial tree. This tree’s lights connect automatically via wiring in the sections of trunk, so setup is easy. They are traditional incandescents, not LEDs, and they come only in clear, but if you prefer the warmer glow of incandescents, that’s a feature, not a bug. And unlike with some incandescent Christmas lights, if one bulb burns out, the rest keep working.

In addition to having realistic needles, the King Noble is also flocked—covered in artificial snow. It’s lovely, especially set against a dark nighttime window or in an unlit corner.

The King of Christmas 7-foot King Noble Flock Fir is a so-called Euro-style tree, with fewer, more naturalistic branches than you find on plump, symmetrical American-style trees. It also has a realistic coating of artificial snow, or flocking, which looks spectacular. The 1,163 branch tips are enough to give it a rich appearance while leaving extra room for an abundance of ornaments—one reason Euro-style trees are becoming increasingly popular—and its 500 white micro LED lights illuminate the “snow” to great effect. The lights connect automatically when you stack the tree’s three sections together, and you can toggle them via a foot pedal or the included remote control from steadily lit to a slow fade-in and fade-out to a variety of blinking patterns. The included gloves and tree bag make setup and storage easier.

Reminiscent of the aluminum trees of the mid-century modern era, this tree has shiny tinsel “needles” that offer a cheerful and charming sparkle.

If retro is your style, Puleo’s 6.5-foot Royal Majestic Spruce Rose Gold tinsel tree may be the tree you’ve been looking for. Unabashedly artificial, it makes no pretense of looking like it grew in the woods and instead could have been right at home on the set of a live-action Jetsons. Its hue is actually closer to a slightly warm silver than a true rose gold, but it’s very pretty, and its 500 clear incandescent bulbs add a sunny warmth when switched on. The white base and pale-gray light strings camouflage themselves, allowing the tree itself to capture all the attention. Just be aware that the engineering is also of a bygone era: You have to manually connect the light strings, and to turn the lights on and off you need to plug and unplug them (or modernize your setup with a smart plug).

Trees like this Puleo offering, with a sparser, shaggier look, are trendy, and the larger gaps between their branches make it easier to hang and show off ornaments.

Like the King of Christmas King Noble Flock Fir, Puleo’s 7.5-foot Pre-Lit Aspen Fir Tree is a Euro-style tree, with fewer branches than you find on American-style trees. (It is not flocked with artificial snow, however.) The resulting larger gaps between branches make it easier to hang and display ornaments. And having fewer branches makes the setup process faster, since fluffing the whole tree into shape takes less time. This tree’s 700 white incandescent bulbs have a warmth that LED bulbs struggle to match, and a single blown-out bulb won’t make the whole string go dark, unlike with older incandescent lights. Its 1,319 branch tips are especially realistic, fading from lighter-green “new growth” at their ends to dark green at their bases, and a brown “trunk” adds to the illusion. One minor drawback: You have to manually plug the light strings together, a more involved method in comparison with the in-pole connections we favor.

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Our crash course in artificial Christmas trees began in 2016, when I spent hours examining trees at House of Holiday (New York City’s largest holiday shop), whose owner, Larry Gurino, “love[s] to geek out over artificial trees”—and did so, to my great benefit. I later visited a fake-tree manufacturer’s New Jersey headquarters to learn more about how trees are designed and made. Since then I’ve shopped extensively for trees online and at several big-box stores, spoken with the owners and representatives of many manufacturers, and set up, troubleshot, decorated, and packed away nearly 20 trees. Senior editor Courtney Schley interviewed the American Christmas Tree Association, which represents artificial-tree makers, to further understand the industry itself, including the manufacturing processes, sales and design trends, and statistics. And many Wirecutter staffers own one of our picks and have provided detailed feedback over the years.

The best way to think about who should get an artificial Christmas tree is to compare the benefits and drawbacks of fake versus live trees.

Durable: A good artificial Christmas tree can last a decade, whereas live trees last a single season.

Cost-effective over the long term: Up front, artificial trees are much more expensive than live trees. In 2022, a live tree on average cost $80, according to the National Christmas Tree Association, which represents the live-tree industry. If you live in a major city, you may find that hard to believe; in our experience, prices there have tended to be much higher. In any case, a good artificial tree can last a decade or more, so the up-front cost is spread out over time.

Low maintenance and low stress: You don’t have to water a fake tree or shimmy underneath it to secure it in a stand. You don’t have to get to the live-tree lot early enough every year to find a good one, or schlep it home from a cut-it-yourself farm (traditions that plenty of people enjoy, of course). Having the tree at home and ready to go when Thanksgiving wraps up means one fewer errand and one less expense at a busy, budget-straining time of year.

Not messy: A fake tree doesn’t scratch up the roof of your car in transit or cover your hands in sap when you’re moving it or setting it up. A fake tree doesn’t shed, and it wouldn’t leave a sad trail of needles if you were to you drag it out of the house after New Year’s Day.

Safer than live trees: A 2019 New York Times article noted that around 160 home fires a year involved Christmas trees, and the National Fire Protection Association reported that “a disproportionate share of Christmas tree fires involved natural trees.” (In an NFPA video, a dry, unwatered live tree burns furiously.) The NFPA also found that Christmas tree lights were the cause of close to half of all Christmas tree fires. Be sure to check any tree lights for exposed wires, and never hang ornaments directly on a wire—the sharp point on a hanger can pierce the wire’s protective coating.

A pain to store: Storage is the most important reason to skip a fake tree—if you don’t have a garage, a big closet, or a basement where you can keep a box the size of a water heater in the offseason, forget it. And if you store your tree in an uninsulated space, both heat and dampness can damage it and shorten its lifespan. We recommend further protecting your investment with a dedicated storage bag, such as the Elf Stor Christmas Tree Bag; they’re easier to get a tree into than the original carton.

Not beautiful out of the box: With a fake tree, setup is hardly effortless, as we saw consistently during our firsthand tests. “Fluffing,” or individually splaying and shaping the hundreds of branch tips, can take an hour if you’re working alone. By contrast, once you get a live tree back home and secure it in the stand, you just need to put its best face forward and start decorating.

Not 100% realistic: Even the highest-quality fake trees still don’t appear truly lifelike when viewed up close. They can be quite similar to the real thing, but their plastic branches usually have a uniform appearance and a waxen shine that tells the eye they’re unnatural. That said, from a distance and lit up, they can look very, very good.

Odorless: Fake trees lack the sweet piney aroma that many people associate with Christmas.

There’s also the question of whether fake trees or real trees are better for the environment. The conclusion we reached is that live trees are considerably better in that regard. But buying a fake tree every 10 years is a drop in the environmental bucket compared with the ecological cost of other, everyday consumption (gasoline, food, electricity, plane travel, and so on).

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We sought versatile designs around 7 feet in height. You can find plenty of great artificial trees these days, in all manner of “species” (assorted firs, spruces, redwoods, and pines) and in multiple heights, girths, forms, colors, and lighting styles. For this guide, we defaulted to the most popular species, as determined by our research into sales trends. Interviews with manufacturers and the American Christmas Tree Association revealed that a 7- or 7.5-foot size is the most popular, since ceilings in US homes are usually 8 or 8.5 feet high, so our picks generally reflect that.

We felt some sticker shock. We were surprised to find how much a good fake tree costs. But cost and realism go hand in hand on artificial trees. Using molds often taken from actual branches, artificial-tree manufacturers shape polyethylene (PE) to produce highly realistic branch tips. A higher percentage of polyethylene on a tree generally commands a higher price.

We sought a blend of materials. Well into the 2000s, the only material that manufacturers used in artificial trees was polyvinyl chloride (PVC). On most trees now, PVC appears primarily as the obviously fake, tinsel-like filler branches near the tree’s trunk. Those branches aren’t prominently visible, but they do add visual density, helping to give the impression of an especially full tree. PVC is cheaper to produce than PE, and it’s also a lot lighter. In searching for trees that had a good mix of realistic PE tips and internal PVC filler, we balanced realism, cost, and weight.

On the topic of PVC: The use of lead as a PVC stabilizer was once a genuine health concern, but this hasn’t been an issue in artificial trees sold in the United States (PDF) for years. So we didn’t rule out trees with PVC in the mix.

We wanted them pre-lit. Pre-lit trees make up 90% of the artificial trees sold in the US, according to the American Christmas Tree Association, and most of them now use energy-saving and durable LED bulbs. We looked for pre-lit trees that had roughly 100 bulbs (or more) per foot of tree height; fewer than that can make the lighting appear sparse. To cover everyone’s tastes, we kept an eye out for trees that could switch between all-white and multicolor lighting. We didn’t prioritize flashing light patterns or other visual effects. As House of Holiday’s Larry Gurino told us, “Most people don’t use them—they just want to see them [advertised] on the box.”

We decided to dismiss extremely low-priced options. After years of testing trees in every price bracket, in 2021 we elected to stop recommending trees at the lowest pricing tiers (those in the $150-or-less range at the 7-foot height). The flimsy materials they’re made of quickly reveal their shortcomings: The needles readily shed when you’re setting up the tree or packing it away, branches break, and the overall look goes from passable to ragged over a few years.

We considered smart options. Finally, we looked into smart trees that you can control via an app or voice assistant, but we soon realized that the best way to do so is to use a reliable plug-in smart outlet and control the tree through that.

A smart plug boosts the IQ of un-brainy devices such as lamps, fans, or string lights, letting you easily set them to turn on or off on a schedule or on command.

For the 2019 version of this guide, we brought in eight trees of various styles and levels of realism and asked a diverse group of Wirecutter folks—writers, programmers, business managers, our editor-in-chief—to set them up in our office in Long Island City, New York. I participated in the setup of each tree to get firsthand experience with all of our contenders. And we invited everyone in the office to share their preferences and impressions of the trees over the course of two weeks. Since then, with office access restricted due to the pandemic, I’ve tested a more limited number of trees on my own, primarily aiming to diversify our range of recommendations.

Here’s what we learned from group testing:

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Realistic, full, generously sized, and versatile, this LED-lit tree can switch between all-white and multicolor modes, and the lights connect as you put the sections together.

(with free Echo Pop and smart plug)

National Tree Company’s 7.5-foot Feel Real Downswept Douglas Fir (PEDD1-D12-75) is our pick among artificial Christmas trees. We’ve seen much pricier trees that look somewhat more realistic, as well as much cheaper trees that look reasonably lifelike. But the Downswept Douglas Fir strikes a sweet balance of price, realism, and ease of setup.

Its generous, 59-inch girth will fill most living rooms. At least as much as height, the width of a tree defines its perceived size. Narrower trees have their strengths, too—they take up less room in an apartment or smaller living area—and are readily available. But if you can accommodate it, a wide tree like the Downswept Douglas Fir brings a bountiful feeling to your decorating.

You get a lot of realism for the price. With 1,867 lifelike polyethylene branch tips, the Downswept Douglas Fir is thickly foliated, and it shows no gaps after fluffing. At 37% polyethylene, it has a higher proportion of realistic foliage—and a lower proportion of fake-looking PVC—than many trees in its price range.

The dual-color LED bulbs let you change its appearance and mood. They can switch between multicolor and a beautiful champagne white—plus multiple combinations of color and white, as well as flashing or “sparkling”—to match a wide range of tastes. The colored lights may add a cheerful air to family gatherings, while white may better complement grown-up parties or traditional decor. Though some of the flashing modes would look at home in a disco, when we selected the “sparkling” mode on the white bulbs (with the lights gently fading and then re-brightening), several people gasped in surprise and delight.

And it has plenty of those lights. With 750 bulbs, the Downswept Douglas Fir meets our recommendation of 100 bulbs per foot of tree height. Fewer than that can look sparse, but the Downswept Douglas Fir’s bulbs are sufficient in number and evenly spaced, producing a well-lit appearance.

The light strings connect automatically. When you stack the tree’s three sections together, the lights link up automatically, thanks to cables and plugs that run through the “trunk.” That’s much handier than hunting down bare plugs among the foliage and manually hooking them together, as you need to do on older trees and more than a few contemporary models.

You get warranty coverage. National Tree Company warrants its realistic pre-lit trees taller than 6.5 feet, including the Downswept Douglas Fir, covering manufacturer defects for five years from the date of purchase; it covers the LEDs for three years. You need proof and the date of purchase to file a claim, and you need to have treated the tree and lights with reasonable care to have your claim approved.

Customer service is good, too. Accidents do happen, like the time editor-in-chief Ben Frumin’s robot vacuum severed a section of his Downswept Douglas Fir’s electrical cord. All it took was one call to customer service and a $15 charge—in 48 hours he had a replacement cord in hand, and the tree was merry and bright once more.

This tree is widely available. If you’d like to see the Downswept Douglas Fir in person, Home Depot, Kohl’s, and many holiday stores typically carry it.

But this isn’t National Tree’s only good option. If realism isn’t your cup of tea, we recommend National Tree’s 7.5-foot Winchester White Pine (WCHW7-300-75). We tested this model in our office, and even our staffers who prefer live trees thought it was beautiful. Its white branches, trunk, and glitter-dusted all-PVC needles give it a pretty, crystalline look when the lights are off. And with the lights on, all of those reflective surfaces make the tree glow from within—whereas green foliage simply disappears into a dark silhouette once the lights are on, the Winchester White Pine transforms into a snowy lantern when lit. The effect is especially striking in a dark room, or in a corner that doesn’t receive a lot of natural light in the daytime.

Offering exceptional realism, Puleo’s Royal Majestic Douglas Fir comes with warm, clear incandescent lights—the kind that keep working even if one bulb goes out.

If you’re looking for a terrifically realistic tree at a good price, consider the Puleo 7.5-foot Royal Majestic Douglas Fir Downswept Tree (RMDD-75QC8). Its polyethylene branch tips exhibit subtle variations in color, becoming lighter green at their ends, just as living branches do. It’s a remarkably convincing effect—upon seeing the Royal Majestic Douglas Fir for the first time, one Wirecutter writer simply said, “It looks like a real tree.”

The Royal Majestic Douglas Fir has a generous 1,860 realistic tips, just shy of the 1,867 tips of the National Tree Company Downswept Douglas Fir. It’s also notably easier to fluff than other trees we’ve tested, because its branches are made with memory wire (Puleo calls it Insta-Shape) and partially spring into place when you set up the tree for the first time. We spent just 10 minutes or so fluffing the Royal Majestic Douglas Fir; the Downswept Douglas Fir took more than twice as long. The pole-connecting lights (Puleo calls the design Sure-Lit) also make setup easier.

The incandescent, clear-only bulbs are the Royal Majestic Douglas Fir’s only potential drawback. If you prefer colors, you’ll have to unstring the lights the tree comes with and string your own, as Puleo does not sell an unlit version of the tree. These incandescent bulbs won’t last nearly as long as LED bulbs typically do, but unlike with older incandescents, a single burnt-out bulb here won’t make the rest of the string of lights go dark. The tree comes with 800 lights—exceeding our 100-per-foot-of-height rule of thumb for a well-lit tree—and incandescents have a lovely soft warmth that LEDs can’t match.

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In addition to having realistic needles, the King Noble is also flocked—covered in artificial snow. It’s lovely, especially set against a dark nighttime window or in an unlit corner.

The King of Christmas 7-foot King Noble Flock Fir is a Euro-style tree—it’s deliberately sparser and more naturalistic than densely branched American-style trees. That lends it a different kind of realism, and it also allows ornaments to hang more freely and stand out against the foliage. This tree is also flocked, made to look as if it has been dusted with snow via a coating of white, foam-like material.

Our more traditionalist testers were initially skeptical, but it looked absolutely lovely after we set it up—especially against a dark background, such as a window at night, when the tree almost seemed to glow. Flocking is “kind of a specialty of ours,” Sol Lakein, the company’s chief operating officer, told us. And having seen an example firsthand, we wouldn’t argue.

The King Noble Flock Fir has 1,163 branch tips and comes with 500 white micro LED bulbs that connect automatically via the company’s Power Pole technology when you put the three sections together. You can set the lights to glow steadily, gently cycle from dim to bright and back, or blink, and you can control them via an included remote control, in addition to the foot pedal on the cord.

Setting up the King Noble Flock Fir was easy, thanks to the Power Pole connections and the somewhat low—but still ample—number of branch tips. Putting the tree together and fluffing it took only about 30 minutes. Predictably, a small amount of the flocking shed during the process, but a quick vacuum took care of that, and we were left with a convincing illusion of a snow-covered live tree.

Reminiscent of the aluminum trees of the mid-century modern era, this tree has shiny tinsel “needles” that offer a cheerful and charming sparkle.

If Christmas turns your mind’s eye to the mid-century modern era, a tinsel tree may be just the thing for you. Similar to the aluminum trees of the age, tinsel trees’ foliage is made of metallic “needles,” and the Puleo 6.5-foot Royal Majestic Spruce Rose Gold Tree (RMSRG-65C5) is an example that we recommend from a manufacturer we trust.

Upon setting up this Puleo tree, one tester wrote: “I love the color, it’s just like a slightly warm silver.” My tree was basically silver with a slight coppery overtone, too. Neither screamed “rose gold,” but both were strikingly pretty, and with the lights on, both trees took on a peachy cast closer to their name.

The warm champagne glow of the 500 clear incandescent bulbs is perfect for this sort of tree; the cool white of many clear LEDs would look harsh. (Also, if rose gold isn’t to your taste, Puleo and many of the other manufacturers whose trees we recommend here make tinsel trees in plain silver, yellow gold, copper, pink, and other colors.)

The 1,228 branch tips are thick with foliage and give the tree a full and natural shape, and the white base and light-gray light strings disappear against the pale, shimmering needles. The foliage is well attached and evidently durable—only a few needles fell off during our setup and fluffing.

From an engineering standpoint, this is quite a rudimentary tree, most notably in its lack of automatic through-the-trunk connections for the light strings. We didn’t have much trouble finding and connecting their plugs manually—and the manual gives an illustrated how-to—but you can expect to spend a few minutes hunting among the branches. The wires of the lights are pale gray, which does a good job of camouflaging them. But since they don’t have a foot-operated power switch, turning the lights on and off means plugging and unplugging the tree at the wall—or installing a plug-in smart outlet that you can control with your phone.

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Trees like this Puleo offering, with a sparser, shaggier look, are trendy, and the larger gaps between their branches make it easier to hang and show off ornaments.

Sparser, naturalistic Euro-style trees are becoming increasingly popular, and Puleo’s 7.5-foot Pre-Lit Aspen Fir Tree (277-APG-75C7) is a terrific and very reasonably priced example. With 700 warm-white incandescent lights and 1,319 branch tips, it presents beautifully after fluffing. The branch tips fade from pale green at the outer ends to dark at the base, an eye-fooling detail that mimics the coloration of live trees, and the brown trunk (as opposed to the typical green) adds to the illusion of reality. The incandescent lights are the modern type—a blown bulb doesn’t cause an entire string to go dark.

Joe Puleo, the company’s owner, explained to us that designers and homeowners have come to appreciate the sparser Euro-style design because ornaments stand out better on such trees than they do on densely foliaged trees. And since you have fewer branches getting in the way, the ornaments are easier to hang. Fewer branches also mean you’ll spend less time fluffing the tree; working alone, I did it in about half an hour.

A minor complaint: You must manually connect the light strings, because they don’t automatically connect through the pole when you put the three sections together. Finding the plugs among the foliage is a bit challenging, and figuring out how to connect them in the proper order took some trial and error in our tests. The experience was not nearly enough of a hassle to dissuade us from recommending the Pre-Lit Aspen Fir, but we hope Puleo will offer a pole-connecting version in the future.

We are testing a Grandin Road Classic Slim and an unlit Balsam Hill Classic Blue Spruce in fall 2024, seeking to fill some gaps in our coverage.

Grandin Road is a part of a massive set of home decor brands under the Qurate Retail umbrella, which also includes Frontgate, Ballard Designs, and the legacy infomercial retailers HSN and QVC. Unlike many other brands we’ve recommended in this guide, they don’t appear to be specialists devoted exclusively to the realm of artificial Christmas trees, but the size of their presence in home decor plus a generally positive experience among user reviews led us to give the Classic Slim, one of their best sellers, a closer look this year.

Our experience with Balsam Hill has been positive, but as one of the higher-priced options in the fake tree space, we wanted to turn to them for a relatively accessible entry point at a price that competed well with the trees we recommend in this guide. Since lights tend to be a failure point on any tree, including Balsam Hill’s, our approach with the Blue Spruce was to eliminate the lights, keep the realism and quality that defines many of the brand’s trees, and potentially land on a long-lasting investment that would justify its high price over time while allowing owners the versatility (but extra work) of selecting and stringing lights as part of the decorating tradition.

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The Balsam Hill 7.5-foot Fraser Fir Flip Tree Color + Clear LED, a former upgrade pick in this guide, outshines other picks on all metrics: It has a higher proportion of realistic branches and quantity of lights, as well as some setup and transport features that our other picks lack. It also looks spectacular. However, in long term evaluation, it has had issues that led us to remove it from our recommendations. We’ve heard multiple reports of issues with its lighting, combined with a trend of negative experiences with replacement products and other customer service issues. We began recommending Balsam Hill trees in 2019, and since that time, Balsam Hill’s already high prices have reached unrealistic levels, and a new crop of high-end trees have emerged to meet the needs of buyers seeking a step up from the midrange options that have long been the central focus of this guide.

We recommended the National Tree Company 7.5-foot Feel Real Downswept Douglas Fir Pencil Slim based on 2019 tests, when it was one of the few space-saving lower-diameter trees on the market. Newer options have emerged since with greater quality and realism. We’re testing new slim candidates in search of a replacement that can save on footprint, storage space, weight, and price.

The 7.5-foot version of the Home Decorators Collection Twinkly Swiss Mountain Fir Christmas Tree comes with app-controlled LED lights that you can program directly or set to multiple preprogrammed patterns, pushing their abilities beyond the seven or eight presets that most white-plus-color trees come with. But compared with our picks, it has a higher proportion of cheap-looking PVC branches, and in our tests the finer polyethylene branches tended to break off during routine handling. We do love its Twinkly smart lights, though, enough so that we’ve added them to our guide to the best Christmas lights.

The National Tree Company PEDD1-312LD-75X (a former pick in this guide) is a great tree, but we made a mistake about one feature when we previously recommended it. This model lacks the company’s PowerConnect feature, which connects the lights when you attach the central pole.

Frontgate mostly competes with Balsam Hill in the premium category, as it focuses on super-realistic and super-expensive trees. You can’t go wrong with any of Frontgate’s offerings, but they are pretty limited, especially if you want something other than clear-only lights.

There are many, many more competitors than what we describe here. If you can’t find one of our picks or a comparable tree from the makers we list in this guide, you can still get an excellent tree. Use the criteria we outline in How we picked, especially regarding branch-tip count, material, and lighting. Once trees are fluffed, lit, and decorated, they can all look great in their own way.

Between artificial and live trees, which is greener? You may not be surprised to learn that within the industry, there is no consensus answer: The American Christmas Tree Association and the National Christmas Tree Association, which represent the artificial-tree and live-tree industries, respectively, both claim the “greener” title.

But an in-depth 2009 life-cycle report on the subject (PDF) gave the edge firmly to live trees, finding that an artificial tree would have to be used for 20 years before its carbon impact fell below that of buying a live tree annually over the same time frame. A more recent look at the topic by The New York Times reached similar conclusions.

Artificial trees are manufactured mostly in China, where environmental laws tend to be less stringent. In addition, the study did not take into account the environmental cost of producing the raw materials—steel and plastics—that the trees are made of, nor the cost of shipping them across the ocean, noted Travis Wagner, professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Southern Maine. Lastly, artificial trees cannot be recycled because it’s too difficult to separate the various materials, so they wind up in landfills when they reach the end of their working lives.

Live trees can be sustainably farmed and harvested, they absorb carbon while growing, and they provide some measure of wildlife habitat. Although live-tree farms do contribute to the consequences of fertilizer and pesticide use, they add value to land that might otherwise be valuable only to developers. At the end of their lives, live trees can be “recycled” in a number of ways, such as by being turned into mulch, used to stabilize sand dunes, or even submerged in lakes to create fish habitat.

But as the 2009 study pointed out, driving a gas-powered car just a few hundred miles produces more greenhouse gases than producing a typical artificial Christmas tree. So compared with the cumulative environmental cost of everyday activities and consumption, a fake tree isn’t much more than a blip.

This article was edited by Harry Sawyers.

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Tim Heffernan

Tim Heffernan is a senior staff writer focusing on air and water quality and home energy efficiency. A former writer for The Atlantic, Popular Mechanics, and other national magazines, he joined Wirecutter in 2015. He owns three bikes and zero derailleurs.

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