The Brown children - Ray, 16, Morgan, 14, and Emily, 10 - ran excitedly through the rows of Christmas trees. Though it was Ray’s year to pick out the tree, his sisters weren’t going to let him choose without giving their opinions. Though their choice of a Leyland cypress became more of a collaborative effort, Ray had the honor of cutting the tree to the ground.

Christmas is a holiday full of tradition, but with the hustle and bustle of the holiday season the tradition of going out as a family to cut down your own tree has fallen to the wayside in recent years in favor of the convenience of an artificial or pre-cut tree.

Even so, there are several Christmas tree farms that keep the tradition alive and a number of families who wouldn’t get their tree any other way.

Shouts of “that one’s too skinny” and “that one isn’t full enough” are common as children looking for the perfect tree run through the six acres of planted Christmas trees at Red Land Nursery off Highway 113 near Temple, one of a handful of such farms in Carroll County. Such was the case as the family of Carrollton’s Ray and Beth Brown continued a holiday tradition they’ve held for many years.

“I joke with the kids every year that we’re going to go to Kroger and get our tree, but they say, ‘No, we’ve got to go to the tree farm,’” Mrs. Brown said.

Following closely behind her children, Mrs. Brown said they enjoy cutting their own Christmas tree because the real ones last longer and are fresher. And with a pre-cut tree you don’t know how long it has been sitting out.

“It’s nostalgic,” she said. “It’s like going out into the woods and cutting down your Christmas tree.”

This scene plays out everyday during the holiday season at Red Land, which also sells woody, ornamental trees and shrubbery the rest of the year. During the Christmas season, the nursery offers a wide variety of planted trees, as well as pre-cut fir trees trucked down from higher elevations.

Red Land owner Mike Allgood planted his first Christmas tree seed in 1976 and sold his first tree in 1978, the beginning of a heyday for the industry that would last about a decade. Though business hasn’t come to a halt, Allgood said it has drastically slowed down since the late 1980s and been even worse this year due to the economy.

“Everybody is talking about going green -- green this and green that -- so it may pick up in a couple years,” he said. “But, I think this year it has a heck of a lot to do with the economy.”

Some of this year’s slow business may also have something to do with the weather because the nursery’s busiest days are typically the weekend of Thanksgiving and the first weekend in December, but Thanksgiving weekend was basically washed out with rain.

So many choices is one reason the demand for live Christmas trees has dropped over the years. Nowadays, people can get any type of artificial tree they want in different colors, sizes and even with lights already installed.

“There’s more competition, not necessarily with more tree farms because there’s about the same amount of them, but people have more choices, especially with the artificial trees,” Allgood said. “Our society has moved more to that convenience. Some of our younger folks don’t even know how to cook anymore because they get it all prepared.”

Even so, Allgood isn’t worried because there are always those people who enjoy the tradition of cutting their own tree and he works to offer his customers a good experience complete with Christmas music in the background, a stone fire pit with logs crackling, and a batch of boiled peanuts.

“There’s nothing like coming out to a place like this in the wide open to pick out and cut your own tree,” he said.

“It’s like going to a ballgame -- you’ve got the smell of hot dogs, people hollering and everything else. It’s just a different feeling cutting your own tree because you know it’s fresh, you know where it came from and it’s just more of an experience than going to a store and buying a tree. It just doesn’t seem like it would be much of a family outing to go to a store, pull an artificial tree off the rack and go home.”