Painted Christmas trees challenge tradition

Belvidere, New Jersey

IN 1850, Charles Dickens published A Christmas Tree. The short story opens with a description of the tree "lighted by a multitude of tapers" and decorated with ornamental guns, pincushions, pen wipers, sugarplums, "teetotums" and "humming-tops". Despite the fertility of his vision, however, Dickens made no mention of spray-painting the tree a brilliant shade of purple.

That work has been left to John Wyckoff, who upended centuries of holiday custom this fall when he began selling a vibrant array of painted Christmas trees at his family farm in the small rural town of Belvidere, New Jersey, just east of the Delaware River. Coming in pink, purple, white and two shades of blue, the colourful conifers are more than a little conspicuous amid a forest of pine-green - a vision less Dickens than Dr Seuss.