Another time, another place.

  When I worked in Brewer my office looked out on Main Street, which is also State Route 9, locally known as the Airline.  Lacking an interstate highway Canadian trucks going from Atlantic Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island) headed to the large Canadian cities of Toronto and Ottawa frequently cross Maine, it's the shortest route.  So those trucks, on the way to I-395, go up or down Main Street in Brewer.
  At Thanksgiving time the ladies and I would try to guess the date the first truckload of Christmas Trees got driven by, if one or two hadn't already made the trip.  Usually during the two weeks near Thanksgiving about 200 truck loads of trees go through Brewer.  A lot of trees are from Maine but the majority were Canadian.  Each truck load has, I'm guessing, one thousand trees, multiply that times the selling price (retail) of a tree and that's a "truckload of money".

Loading up.

Not so much.

  There is another story about Christmas trees too.  It is something that has been going on for more than a hundred years in Chicago.  Farmers in Michigan and Wisconsin raise trees that are going to be donated to the poorest people in Chicago.  The trees are loaded on to the U S Coast Guard Cutter Mackinaw at it's homeport of Cheboygan, Michigan.  Boy Scouts and other volunteers do the "dirty work".
  The trees are taken to the Navy Pier in Chicago and the volunteers and Boy Scouts again do the dirty work, there are about 8000 trees!
  All of this happens on the first Friday of December.  Just a by the way here, the Cutter is working on buoy maintenance during the trip on Lake Michigan, it's hardly just a "joyride".

USGC Mackinaw arrives in Chicago, with trees on board.