WATAUGA COUNTY, N.C. — This is a busy time of year for the wholesale Christmas tree business, which is bustling in the N.C. mountains, where a piece of the state could get sent anywhere in the world from a tree farm here.

What You Need To Know 

Wholesale Christmas trees are on the road, heading around the country from N.C. farms

The Critcher Brother shipped more than a 100,000 trees around the world

Keller said his grandfather started the business 70 years ago

Jeff Keller works for Critcher brothers and says they have more than a hundred men working hard to prepare for the holidays. 

"These trees are between 6 and 7 all the way up to 9 to 10 feet," Keller said.

His grandfather started the business 70 years ago to grow and ship produce. In 1980, they started planting Fraser firs.

"It's a lifetime. We have some things we started almost 30 years ago, and we still don't have it to market yet," Keller said.

It takes a long time for a tree to go from seed to market.

"To get a 6 to 7 foot tree to market, you are looking at 10 years," Keller said.

They are a wholesale Christmas tree farm. Keller says North Carolina is second in the nation for the number of trees sold wholesale. Fraser firs are the most popular because of needle retention and smell. Keller says his fir is shipping out a little over a hundred thousand trees all over the world.

"We ship from Florida to New York. We do the Midwest, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Texas and Colorado. We have some trees that go to Canada, and we ship some to the Bahamas," Keller said.

Keller says its nice to put a little piece of North Carolina in everyone's homes.

"I wanted to be part of that," Keller said.