Bye bye Thanksgiving — Montgomery Co. orchard prepares for Christmas tree rush

Christmas is less than four weeks away, and a lot of us will be getting the tree out of the attic or heading out to buy a real one.

“The day after Thanksgiving is when you’re going to come and you’re going to see us whipping around here selling trees fast and furious,” Butler Orchard’s agritainment manager Gina Giantonio told WTOP.

Giantonio is in charge of everything fun at Butler’s Orchard in Germantown, Maryland.

“You’re in Butler’s Orchard’s five-acre farm park, where you can enjoy our farmer’s porch kitchen with lots of great food. We have the playground for the children, the giant slides, the animals. People love to feed the animals,” Giantonio said.

Next year will be Butler’s Orchard’s 75th anniversary. Three generations of Butlers have run the orchard — and Giantonio said the fourth has already been born.

This weekend you will see a lot of cars driving out of the parking lot at Butler’s Orchard with Christmas trees tied to the roof.

“Do not worry, we’re full service here. We will make sure we put that on the roof and tie that down safely. So if you’re going 70 miles down 270 or just down the street, we’ll make sure you get it home safely,” Giantonio said.

WTOP asked Giantonio what type of tree most people are looking for.

“A lot of people are going for the smell. That’s one thing a lot of people like is that fragrant, fresh smell — Fraser is very good at that. You want to make sure to walk around to see if you see any bare spots, things like that. And you know, needle retention is very important. So you just want to make sure that you can put your hands on this tree and just make sure nothing’s coming off,” Giantonio said.

Another important piece of advice to remember when you are looking for a tree, according to Giantonio, is size.

In the farm park is where you can purchase precut Fraser fir trees. If you want to cut a tree down yourself, that can also be done at Butler’s Orchard, which has Douglas fir and Canaan fir.

“We have people coming from all over the DMV. We have people coming from Pennsylvania down here to get trees,” Jerry Fleming said. “One family comes from New Jersey,”

Fleming has worked at Butler’s Orchard for 10 years and offered this advice for buying Christmas trees.

“Look at the fullness. We want to make sure that it doesn’t have a lot of dead needles. You don’t want to have a lot of vines inside of it,” Fleming said.

If you decide to make a reservation at Butler’s Orchard to cut down a tree, Fleming has tips for first timers.

“You want to cut it as close to the ground as possible. You want to leave as much of the trunk as you can on the tree. That makes it a lot easier for us to trim it up.”

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