Hooking up the strings of lights on prelit trees can be a pain.When setting up one of the inexpensive, all-PVC, decidedly non-realistic trees in our test, Wirecutter staff writer Anna Perling stated flatly, “I hate this tree.” But an hour later she admitted that it looked nice. Once we lit and decorated them all, every tree in our test looked great.And the branches can scrape your hands, so consider wearing gloves. To make a tree (of any price or level of realism) look good, you have to “fluff it,” a tedious but necessary process in which you manually separate and arrange the branch tips to give the tree more volume and a more realistic shape. Fake trees arrive with their branches tightly compressed from being squeezed into the shipping box they look less like living things than they do furry green war clubs.Even inexpensive trees can look very good from across the room, and more expensive trees-those with a high proportion of realistic branch tips-can look truly real.Living trees have color variations and other “imperfections,” and that’s part of what tells the eye that they’re real. No fake tree looks convincingly lifelike up close (say, from a distance of 6 feet or less).Be sure to check any tree lights for exposed wires, and never hang ornaments directly on the wires, as the weight or the sharp points on a hanger can compromise the wires’ protective coating. The NFPA also found that Christmas tree lights were the cause of close to half of all Christmas tree fires (PDF). In an NFPA video, in contrast, a dry, unwatered live tree burned furiously. In the same test, a healthy and well-watered live tree caught on fire immediately but eventually went out-though it’s important to note that their test tree had no ornaments or lights and stood against a concrete wall.
Safer: A 2019 New York Times article noted that while around 160 home fires a year involved Christmas trees, the National Fire Protection Association reported that “a disproportionate share of Christmas tree fires involved natural trees.” Also in 2019, researchers for a local CBS news station based in Washington, DC, attempted to set an artificial tree on fire (video) with a lighter but didn’t succeed until they poured around a gallon of gasoline over it. Like the less expensive trees we tested, it still requires you to put in some time arranging and perfecting it to make it look its best, but it can achieve a level of fullness and realism that’s truly stunning. The “flip” function simply tilts the lower section of the tree upright during setup-so you don’t have to lift it into place yourself-another welcome feature since the tree weighs 78 pounds in total. We particularly appreciate that this tree’s base has wheels, a unique feature among our test group, as they make moving it into place and into storage much easier. The lights, like the Downswept Douglas Fir’s, connect automatically via plugs within the trunk, and they too can switch between clear, color, or a mix of the two. It also has more lights (1,320 versus 750), creating an opulent display that our testers universally preferred. (For smaller homes, we recommend the 6.5-foot version.)Ĭompared with National Tree’s Downswept Douglas Fir, Balsam Hill’s 7.5-foot Fraser Fir Flip Tree Color + Clear LED has a higher number and a greater proportion of realistic branches, which makes it appear more lifelike especially from across a room. Finally, it’s widely available, easy to set up, and competitively priced. At 7.5 feet high and almost 5 feet across, the tree is generously proportioned it’ll fill the corner of almost any living room. And whereas some trees require you to hunt down the light strings’ plugs among the foliage and manually connect them, this tree’s trunk-mounted PowerConnect system automatically does the job for you when you stack its three sections together. Its 750 built-in LED bulbs fill its branches nicely, and the lights can switch from all-white to multicolor to a mix of the two, giving it uncommon versatility. Offering nearly 2,000 lifelike polyethylene branch tips surrounding a core clad with very fake PVC “pine needles,” it has a construction similar to that of other high-quality artificial trees-but at 37% polyethylene, a higher-than-average proportion of those lifelike branches, it creates a more convincing illusion of a living tree. Compared with both pricier and cheaper trees, the National Tree Company Feel Real Downswept Douglas Fir (PEDD1-D12-75) strikes a good balance of cost, realism, and ease of setup.
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