Christmas Land

Toby and Cynthia Hall, owners of Hall’s Christmas Tree Farm in Sangerville, know that growing trees, like farming in general, requires plenty of time and patience. “Farming is a lot of living and learning,” Cynthia says. “You’re constantly adapting to the job.”

Toby’s father and grandfather grew everything from potatoes to peas, and raised chickens across from their own slaughterhouse. During the winters of the Great Depression the farm wasn’t being used and the Hall family needed another way to earn money. An aunt in Massachusetts suggested they cut and haul some of their trees into town to sell for the holidays. Toby’s father and grandfather went into the woods, climbed their biggest trees and removed the tops, lowering them with ropes to keep them from shattering in the cold. “They’d get as many as they could stack in their old truck, drive downtown, and set up like little gypsies in a parking lot and sell the trees for extra money,” Cynthia says.

The family continued planting trees as Toby graduated from high school, went to college, enlisted in the Navy, served in Vietnam, and then used the G.I. Bill to finish his education in the forestry program at the University of Maine in Orono. “Eventually there were more trees than there were other things, and they were starting to make money with it,” Cynthia says. The Christmas tree farm was born. Today, it takes up 60 of the 425 acres on the Halls’ woodland property.

Cynthia and Toby met in the mid-1970s while she was working in a doctor’s office in Guilford and he was registering voters on behalf of his father, a Democratic state legislator. She started helping on the tree farm and learned from Toby’s parents how to make wreaths and trim the trees. “Before I knew it I had more jobs than I needed,” she says. She started working on the farm full-time. Her jobs include the seasonal order for Rep. Mike Michaud’s office. Every holiday season Michaud orders 35 of the Halls’ Maine wreaths to give to people in Washington, D.C. Each wreath boasts white pine, a couple of chickadees, and white pine cones, representing Maine’s state tree, bird, and flower.

The Halls estimate that roughly 50,000 Christmas trees grow on their land. They’re looking at a harvest of around 6,000 trees this season—a combination of both balsam and Fraser fir trees, which take 10 and 12 years to mature, respectively. Toby explains that the Christmas tree business experiences cycles of demand, and that they began planting the slower-growing Frasers as a hedge against gluts in the balsam market.

The farm serves as the setting for a new children’s book, Who Would Like a Christmas Tree? written by Ellen Obed Bryan and illustrated by Anne Hunter.
While working the busy months of November and December, Toby, an accomplished musician, will often break out in song and teach his crew of a dozen seasonal workers how to yodel. By December 20th all of their trucking orders are completed and the crew moves on, leaving only the people who show up to cut their own tree from the farm.

Though Toby and Cynthia anticipate cutting back on their workload in the coming years, they would like to pass the tree farm business on to the next generation. The couple has strong roots in the area and can’t imagine being anywhere else. Some of the ashes of Toby’s parents are spread on the farm, and the rest are kept in the house in a wooden urn, made from one of their trees.