It’s beginning to look a lot Like Christmas!

Shelton is the perfect place to kick off Festival of Firs with Christmastown events beginning December 1. Cue the lights, music, parade, and street celebrations – on the southern Olympic Peninsula, Shelton is where Christmas gets its "roots."

Just twenty minutes north of Olympia, Shelton is typically branded as a logging community. The streets were built wide to accommodate the oversized logging trucks going down West Railroad Avenue to the mill that still operates on the town's waterfront.

But trees weren’t just cut to make into boards or pulped into paper.  Up until the 1990s, Shelton was known as "Christmastown, USA – the Christmas Tree Capital of Nation. "

Initially doubtful, Kirk sent out the trees and was surprised to receive an order for two train carloads for the next year.  Kirk cut three carloads instead and went down to Los Angeles to sell them himself, never returning to milling again.  These wild Christmas trees were a major product shipped to markets in Seattle, Oregon, California, and Texas.   

As early as the 1920s, wild-grown Douglas-firs were hand-cut to thin out already growing forests, such as logging cut-blocks and the Olympic National Forest.  In 1918, G.R. Kirk was working as manager of a mill when he received word from his brother-in-law in Texas requesting a train car full of wild-cut Douglas-fir trees for the Christmas market.

For the next 50–odd years, Starting in late October, everyone who was available was employed in cutting and loading freight trains of these hearty little pop-up trees to be shipped all over the US and loaded on ships to go abroad.

Early Christmas tree cutters based out of Shelton included the John Hofert Company and the G.R. Kirk Company, who developed methods of “culturing” – trimming wild trees with long knives (looking similar to machetes) to promote the fluffy, full growth consumers desired in their Christmas trees.

The Christmas tree market shifted in the 1990s from favoring the hardy natural Douglas-firs to the more perfect, cultivated noble-firs. This forced many growers to diversify and focus their growing operations in more agriculturally rich soils as Mason County’s glacial till soil could not provide the necessary nutrients.