Trent Preszler

They used real trees as models to make artificial trees.

So now you get a tree from Balsam Hill Brands, and some of the branches have imperfections, or they're bent or twisted in a certain way, or maybe they're slightly asymmetrical, or there's a pine cone that's dripping off and kind of hanging awkwardly to the side.

And so they've perfected the art of imperfections in trees.

And in that way, they're selling more authentic trees.

And they're also really testing Americans' very notion of what authenticity is in the first place.

There was one other thing I came across in my research that I just couldn't believe, which was the massive mobilization of the US military during World War I. We needed to supply the allied forces with timber to make fighter planes, to make airplanes.

And the first generation of fighter planes in the early 1900s were often made out of a combination of aluminum, lightweight aluminum,

wood and the wood that was most preferred for that purpose was Sitka spruce which grew right on the ocean in Oregon and Washington and kind of these low-lying saltwater bogs and so the US military mobilized it was close to 400,000 military men brought them in from other branches of the military and shipped them to the Pacific Northwest

to cut down Sitka spruces, which we would then haul across the country by train and put on boats to Europe.

So we supplied lumber for the Allies to build airplanes and it really turned the tide in the war.