O coral tree, O coral tree, How lovely are your branches!
"Dear Brother Snoopy, This year I had a great idea. For my Christmas tree, I decorated a tumbleweed. It looked really beautiful. But then it left!"
— Spike writing a letter to Snoopy, Peanuts, December 3, 1987
Christmas is a time of many traditions, and no doubt the most famous one is the Christmas Tree. When the holidays come, the tree is prominently placed in many a house and richly decorated with lights, ribbons and whatnot.
The classic Christmas Tree is usually an evergreen conifer such as a spruce, pine or fir— either a real one or an artificial tree designed to look like one. However, for one reason or another, characters may not always be able to get their hands on such a tree, or they don't feel like doing what everybody else does and want to set themselves apart. The solution: just use a different kind of tree. Or if there’s no kind of tree available, a different plant. Or, if a character is either truly desperate or in a creative mood, something that isn’t a kind of vegetation at all. As long as it can be decorated with the traditional Christmas tree decorations, it can serve the part right?
Popular choices include a palm tree in a tropical setting or a cactus in a dessert setting. Naturally, this trope tends to show up mostly in Christmas Episodes and Christmas Specials. It can also show up in stories set in a world where Christmas itself does not exist, but something similar does. Not to be confused with Aluminum Christmas Trees, which is used to describe things that actually exist despite sounding fictional at first.
Examples:
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Advertising
- The 1990 Corona Extra Feliz Navidad commercial "O'Tannenpalm"
features a tropical palm tree lit up with Christmas lights as someone whistles "O Tannenbaum/O Christmas Tree" in the background. As of 2025, it is still aired on American television each year, and that same year Corona released a Yule Log based on the commercial.
Anime & Manga
- ERASED: At one point, Satoru takes Kayo to see a “Christmas tree” in the form of a non-evergreen tree in the forest covered in ice sparkling in the evening light.
- Downplayed in Kaguya-sama: Love is War. The Fujiwara family does use a classic evergreen tree for Christmas, but one year Toyomi decided to repurpose it as a kadomatsu for New Year's and they've just been reusing the same tree over and over again, eventually leading them to mash together various Christmas and New Year traditions in a single celebration.
Comic Books
- In a Christmas story of the Dutch comic Eppo, the protagonists are too late to buy a Christmas tree as all vendors are sold out. Desperate, they tell the last vendor that any tree will do. They end up with an oak tree for Christmas.
- The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: The Transformers Holiday Special features the Lost Light's crew setting up a cloaking device and signal boosters in order to sneak through hostile territory. The cloaking device happens to be a large green cone, and the signal boosters brightly colored spheres that need to be attached to the cone and strung across the ship. Meanwhile, Brainstorm, the ship's resident Mad Scientist, has been tinkering with something called a "contrivance engine"...
Comic Strips
- Garfield:
- Discussed in the December 18, 1997 strip, when Jon gets his foot stuck in the Christmas Tree stand and is unable to get it off. Garfield suggests they could just decorate Jon instead.
- In the December 12, 1999 strip, Garfield decorates Jon as a Christmas tree to protest the fact that Jon hasn't gotten an actual tree yet.
- Peanuts:
- Snoopy's brother Spike lives alone in the desert and owns a cactus he christened Joe Cactus. In the December 20, 1988 strip◊, Spike is shown decorating Joe Cactus with Christmas lights, only to realize he has nowhere to plug them in.
- A year before, in the December 03, 1987 strip◊ (as well as an adapted scene in I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown), Spike decorated a tumbleweed for Christmas, but it was blown away by the wind.
- Snoopy's brother Spike lives alone in the desert and owns a cactus he christened Joe Cactus. In the December 20, 1988 strip
Fan Works
- Eight Mercenaries and a Toddler: In I'll Be Home for the Holidays, Spy (being Jewish) has never decorated a Christmas tree before, except once, when the team was stuck in Teufort for Christmas and Engineer welded together a fake tree from metal scraps. They decorated it with grenades, sticky bombs, and pocket knives, and Scout put one of his baseball caps on the top in place of a star.
Films — Animation
- Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas: During the song "As Long As There's Christmas", Belle and the castle's servants stack dishes and bowls together in the shape of a Christmas tree and decorate it. They descend a chandelier and place castle decorator Angelique, who had been turned into a Christmas angel as part of the curse, atop it. Belle then briefly imagines the decorations as a real tree near the end of the song, showing her longing to bring Christmas back to the castle.
- Klaus: A giant hanging whale skeleton that's the centerpiece of Smeerensburg's entrance is eventually decorated in lights and ornaments until it makes an impressively festive-looking Christmas tree.
Films — Live-Action
- Home Alone 2: Lost in New York: Discussed during an argument between Kevin and his mom about the family planning to spend Christmas in Florida. Kevin points out there are no Christmas trees in Florida, to which his mom suggests he could decorate a palm tree instead.
- The Legend of Frenchie King: The Sarrazins celebrate Christmas with a cactus serving as their Christmas tree, the joke being that they live in a very desert-like zone in the Wild West, so that's the best they could do.
- Merry Christmas, Drake & Josh: Josh's attempt to get the kids a real Christmas tree from the forest ends in disaster. With no money to buy a real tree, he ends up grabbing a trashed lawn chair left on the side of the road and has them decorate that. They have to squint at it just to make it look "kinda nice".
Literature
- Holiday Mischief with Stitch, Nani, Lilo and Stitch are seen decorating a small palm tree for Christmas.
- According to Soul Music, the Discworld's You Mean "Xmas" festival, Hogswatchnight, is traditionally celebrated with an "oak tree in a pot". This is reiterated in Hogfather, which describes a Hogswatch tree as "a bare branch of oak, but so much shiny holly and mistletoe had been wired onto it that it gleamed in the light of the candles."
Live-Action TV
- iCarly: In "iChristmas", Spencer creates a metallic, magnetic Christmas tree out of parts he found in the junkyard. It's Played for Drama, as not only is Carly disappointed that they don't have a real tree, but it starts a fire in the night and sets the presents ablaze, making her blame him. This is what triggers the rest of the plot, where Carly is transported to a world where her brother was "born normal". When she gets her real life back, she stops Spencer from trashing the tree and declares that it's her favorite tree ever.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000: In the KTMA version of "Gamera", Joel cryogenically freezes Crow and decorates him to act as the Satellite of Love's Christmas tree to cover for the fact that his performer was out of town during production. This carries over into "Gamera vs. Gaos" and "Gamera vs. Zigra" where he is thawed out.
Video Games
- In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, there exists a giant hermit crab named Hermie decorated like a Christmas tree, at his own insistence. Hermie uses a part of the Beanstar as a makeshift star, forcing the Bros to fight him to get it.
Web Animation
- Doodle Digest: One of the videos is "Top 10 Letters to Use as a Christmas Tree", and points out that some of them don't work (like O, which wouldn't stay in place, and G, which would be easy to lose decorations on), but others would (like A, which is almost pine-shaped anyway).
- In the Homestar Runner cartoon "A Decemberween Mackerel", the characters attend the lighting of, in Homestar's words, "the lights attached to a pole in a tree-shaped fashion." A telephone pole, specifically. Marzipan states out that "if it was pitch black and I squinted and was a few miles away, [the pole] would sort of look like a tree almost!"
Webcomics
- Breaking Cat News: In the First Annual Christmas Special (Dec. 1, 2014, reprinted several times in the GoComics editions), Tommy is homeless and living in a potting shed, where he's decorated a traffic cone with lights ("Never guess she's artificial!"). The "Tommybaum" caught on with fans of the strip, who create their own versions and display them on social media.
- xkcd: One panel near the end of The 2008 Christmas Special implies that Black Hat stole the World Tree Yggdrasil to use as a Christmas tree.
Web Original
- Gaia Online: Around Christmas every year, a forum is launched which allows users to decorate virtual Christmas trees using items generated by posting in that forum. (This was the official Christmas event in a few years, but it's now done purely for fun.) By default, any topic created in the Christmas forum gets a green Christmas tree, but users can pay Gold (or Platinum) to purchase a tree in an alternate colour, the options being black, white, pink, red, gold, purple (called Byzantium) and teal (called Seafoam). There is also the option of using Gaia Cash to purchase something even less conventional than a tree in an unusual colour. The options here are Dead (a black tree with bare branches), Prism (a multicoloured swirl), Ice (a white doily), Cookie (an iced cookie in the shape of a Christmas tree) and Cake (basically a Christmas cake).
- Neopets: Some of the "Christmas Tree" items, usually given out by the Advent Calendar, aren't normal trees at all:
- The "Geraptiku Christmas Tree" is entirely made out of logs stuck together in the shape of a tree, and it's not even decorated.
- The "JubJub Christmas Tree" is just a bunch of Christmas JubJubs sitting in a pile, forming a tree.
- The "Moltara Christmas Tree" looks to be made of geometric metal pieces, and has steam vents on the top.
- The "Snowman Christmas Tree" is a fake snowman that also resembles a Christmas tree, with the Flavor Text even asking which one it's supposed to be.
- The "Stone Christmas Tree" is a tree entirely made of stone, coming from Tyrannia.
- SCP Foundation: "SCP-2497 — Home for the CactusNights": SCP-2497 are a collection of nearly 800 saguaro cacti that randomly teleport and turn those who get pricked on them into still-sapient plastic Christmas trees. By sheer accident, it was discovered that an SCP-2497 will stop teleporting if a stocking is hung on them.
- Subeta: The Lumineve/Luminaire trees you can choose from each year in December have different variants depending on the land they're from. In particular, the Delphi tree resembles a piece of driftwood, and the Saherimos tree is a cactus with hundreds of "branches" that vaguely form a pointed shape together.
Western Animation
- All Grown Up!: Near the end of Christmas Episode "The Finster Who Stole Christmas", Chuckie returns the Christmas Tree he accidentally stole from an innocent family, with his family ultimately using a bonsai tree that Kimi and Kira brought from their trip to Japan.
- The Berenstain Bears Specials: In The Berenstain Bears' Christmas Tree, the forest animals decorate the bear's house (they live in a large oak tree) with the family's decorations to thank Papa for not cutting down a tree that was home to a family of birds.
- Christmas In Tattertown: Mr. Tannenbaum, a potted evergreen that can move and speak and gets decorated with living ornaments once he agrees to be the official Tattertown Christmas tree.
- In the Color Classics cartoon "Christmas Comes But Once a Year", Grampy (originally from Betty Boop cartoons) places nine different green umbrellas (each one larger than the last) inside each other and opens them all at once until it makes one giant Christmas tree. Once decorated, it's indistinguishable from the real thing.
- Futurama: "Xmas Story" reveals that pine trees went extinct in 2200, so everybody uses palm trees as Xmas trees instead. This becomes a Running Gag in the other Christmas episodes of the series.
- Jackie Chan Adventures: In "A Jolly J-team Xmas", El Toro Fuerte and Paco are shown somewhere in Mexico decorating a cactus with lights and a star.
- Mickey Mouse (2013): At the end of the Christmas Episode "Duck the Halls", when Santa explains that Donald can travel south for the winter and celebrate Christmas, all the palm trees magically acquire Christmas lights.
- The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: In "Stripes", Tigger loses his stripes and suffers an identity crisis while his friends try to help him figure out who he is. At one point, Pooh and Piglet try if Tigger could be a good Christmas Tree and decorate him accordingly.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In '"Christmas Who?", a big coral tree is set up as a Christmas tree in Bikini Bottom. Justified as a conventional tree is not the kind of thing you would find underwater. Most of the time.
- The Wild Thornberrys: In "Have Yourself A Thornberry Little Christmas", the Thornberry Family spends their Christmas in the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, Africa, and they use a dead tree as their Christmas tree.
Debbie: It will be easier to decorate than last year's cactus.
Real Life
- Bibliophiles, book stores, and libraries will sometimes stack books in the shape of a Christmas tree and decorate them with lights or garland.
- Similar to the books example above, supermarkets will often set up a display of merchandise they're selling in a pyramid or conical shape like a Christmas tree. Bonus points if the boxes, bottles, or whatever they're stacking happens to be green in color.
- Around Christmas time, some schools, universities and labs that offer chemistry will build what's called a Chemistree: Using retort stands and round flasks filled with colorful liquids as a substitute for Christmas bulbs, and usually, other decorations are added too. In Germany, there's even an award for the most creative chemistree.
- In the New England region of the United States, an area of the country known largely for its bustling seaports and fishing industry, you'll find towns that proudly display Christmas trees made of lobster traps. The first one known was in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 2001, but towns all along the coast from Rhode Island to Maine display lobster trap trees and hold lighting ceremonies for them the way other towns hold lighting ceremonies for traditional Christmas trees.