Farm Wraps Up Trees for Holiday Fun

Centreville may be about 3,500 miles from the North Pole, but you can visit a local Santa's workshop at , where they fashion made-to-order holiday wreaths along with a huge assortment of big and tall Christmas trees.

The farm, which is mostly known for its Halloween carnival, opens its Christmas festival store today, said Rosie Garant, holiday store supervisor. The Christmas store, nestled in a corner of the farm along Pleasant Valley Road and Braddock Road, is popular because of the handmade wreaths that have become something of a holiday tradition in Centreville.

Teams of farm workers have been busy making hundreds of the fresh, pine bough wreaths by hand. Garant special-ordered boxes of the fresh branches, which are taken from the lower limbs of the Christmas trees. The limbs are hand sorted for size and beauty and twisted onto a metal wring that forms the solid backing for the wreath, Garant said.

The wreaths are then dipped into a special preservative, dried and decorated with traditional bows and berries, before they are placed on the lot for sale, Garant said. They have about 200 pre-made wreaths ready for today.

"Our wreaths are always very full and fluffy," Garant said. "And they last all the way through the holiday season."

The wreaths come in three sizes, 10-inch, 12-inch and 16-inch, Garant said, although they can make much bigger wreaths, anything up to about 30 inches.

"If someone wants a special order, they should just come to the farm, see what we have and talk with us," Garant said, "That's the easiest way."

But the Christmas store is more than the handmade wreaths, said Sam Fairl, a Cox farm worker who was overseeing the unloading of about 550 trees that were shipped from Tennessee this week. The store also gets its trees from farms in Pennsylvania and Oregon, which will be brought in throughout the season. The store does not offer live trees or cut-your-own trees.

"Growing the trees, now that's a lot of work," said Fairl, a nine-year farm employee. After the trees are cut down and shipped, they stay fresh remarkably well stored outside in the cool Northern Virginia fall days, Fairl said.

"The only time they really dry out is when we have really hot days when the sun bakes the trees outside on the lot," Fairl said.

The store also features a marshmallow roast, hot cider and hot chocolate, roasted almonds, kettle corn, a life-sized gingerbread house and kiddy slides for the younger set. And no Santa's workshop would be complete without snow (they have a snow machine if the weather doesn't cooperate) and a visit from Saint Nick, who is scheduled to be at the store the first three Saturdays in December.