Aluminum Christmas Trees

Among the seven differently styled Christmas trees you’ll see at the Martinsville-Henry County Heritage Center & Museum is a classic aluminum tree.

While Christmas trees come in any color and material today, the first one to veer off commercially from the green tree was the aluminum tree.

Aluminum Christmas trees were first made by Modern Coatings Inc. of Chicago in the mid 1950s. During the 1960s, the Aluminum Specialty Company of Wisconsin made more than 1 million of them. You couldn’t hang traditional light strings on them, because they would short circuit and could electrocute someone, so these trees were illuminated by a rotating lighted color wheel placed on the floor beneath them.

The television program “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in 1965 had a dramatic impact on aluminum trees: Lucy urged Charlie Brown to get “a big, shiny, aluminum tree,” but, turning his back on the commercialization of Christmas, he picked out a scrawny little natural tree instead.

Come by the museum and see our Christmas trees.