This is a fun little holiday time sink: “What Christmas was like the year you were born.” It sent me down a total rabbit hole. Turns out, the year I was born was the apex for sales of aluminum Christmas tree sales. Kind of a dubious distinction, there.

After that, sales dropped off the next year, presumably because most people who wanted an aluminum tree already bought one. But what really spelled doom for the aluminum tree? The premiere broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. That “great, big, shiny aluminum Christmas tree,” in pink, ordered by Lucy and Violet just couldn’t compete with this: 

It could also have something to do with this, which further digging down the aluminum tree spiral uncovered: a warning from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, reportedly first issued in the 1970s and never rescinded.

To quote Linus Van Pelt, “Christmas is not only getting too commercial, it’s getting too dangerous.”