Memorandum from John J. Hearne to Frederick H. Boland (Dublin)
'Christmas Trees'
(14.F.14)

I have the honour to report as follows:¹

Whether you took the New York Central or the old Delaware and Hudson from New York to Montreal any day since mid-November, 1946, you passed scores of freight cars going south along the Lake or the River carrying thousands of Christmas trees.

These were loaded in the Province of New Brunswick and bound for South America. The Province is, area for area, the largest exporter of Christmas trees in the world. This year New Brunswick has exported one and a half million of the trees to fifteen South American countries. They have been carried on seven hundred freight cars. The trees are five to seven feet tall. They are packed flat in bundles two thousand to the car. One company's freight charges are $50,000.

The New Brunswick Christmas trees are not grown in nurseries. The fir and spruce of the Province are so prolific that cultivation is unnecessary. It is not worth the cost. The trees abound in the wide pasture lands where there is plenty of light and room to grow. They do better in these broadlands than in the Canadian forest.

It was nice (on November 28th) to see Santa Claus racing his teams of freight cars, puffing and shouting as usual, his great beard swaying this way and that in the wind and most people thinking it was the steam from the train. But if you wanted to watch the sun on the Catskills; or glimpse the Governor's House at Albany, or the Fort at Ticonderoga; or see how the skitrails were packing on the knees of the Adirondacks; or even read the time by the station clock at Plattsburg (with the fine open countenance like the clock at Kingsbridge); if you wanted to do any of these things - lo and behold, there was that Santa Claus blocking the view all the time with his teams and his trees. Like a common witch he was, for all his charging chariots, riding down the hemisphere, and always by your window, on his forest of brooms.