By Molly Darr, Ph.D. Growing up in rural Virginia, it was an unwritten rule that we could never settle for a plastic tree at Christmas time. We had to get the real deal, and after hours of bickering and wandering through our local choose-and-cut lot, our family almost always selected a Fraser fir. It’s not that the other locally grown varieties weren’t beautiful in their own way; my brother and I just couldn’t deny the perfect shape, smell, and color that Fraser firs had to offer.
