Jimbo Livaditis has sold Christmas trees through wartime and peace, recessions and booms, disasters both local and national, and the rapid advancement of fake-tree technology. He has been in the business his whole life, spending his childhood Decembers running around the parking lot of his family’s Atlanta ice-cream shop, where his dad—the eponymous Big John of Big John’s Christmas Trees—had started selling trees in 1949 to offset slow winter sales of frozen treats. He went to work on the tree lots with his siblings as a teenager in the 1970s, and in 1987, he and his brother took over the company. In all those years, he has never seen people jonesing for Christmas trees the way they have this year. “I hate to overuse the word unprecedented,” Livaditis told me. “But it is exceptional.”
By last Wednesday, Big John’s had already closed five of its nine lots because the company was simply running out of trees. “We usually sell right up until December 22 or 23,” Livaditis said. “Shutting down any of our lots this early is something that will go down as an historic event in our 71 years of operation.” After selling what he described as a “surreal” number of trees on Black Friday, Livaditis put out feelers to friends in the industry everywhere from Northern California to South Florida, looking for more stock to truck in, to no avail. He kept hearing the same thing: Sellers in every corner of the country were going through Christmas trees almost as fast as they could get them off the truck.
