Purple Groove is among the company’s most popular shades. ” onclick=”return clickedImage(this);” src=”/sharedcontent/dws/img/v3/11-23-2007.NHG_23tree1.GBI29GP4N.1.jpg” height=”274″ onmouseover=” this.style.cursor=’hand’” alt=”"> Purple Groove is among the company’s most popular shades. When it came to Christmas trees in America in the late ’50s and ’60s, households went one of three ways: real, flocked or fake.
If your mom and dad weren’t into spraying their tree with the fluffy flocking chemical or if vacuuming up dried pine needles from their wall-to-wall carpeting didn’t fly, there was one more postwar option: the tinsel tree. Back then the paper tinsel coated in aluminum was highly flammable, so you had to put your shiny tree on a rotating pedestal and spotlight it with a motorized color wheel to make it truly sparkle.
Alas, the it look of holiday kitsch did not survive beyond the ’60s until its recent rebirth. Hipster homes everywhere are again showing off their true colors. Treetopia makes pre-lit tinsel trees in baby pink, grape-soda purple, tuxedo black, candy-apple red and other crazy colors ($199 to $359). Its products show up on cable’s HGTV, inside USA Today and on the cover of Martha Stewart’s Blueprint magazine, the audience for which skews much younger than the domestic diva’s other publications.
Connie Chen, vice president of marketing for Treetopia, says most of her customers have a traditional green tree and want their second tree to wow the neighbors. The purple and the silver are really popular. People get their second tree and go crazy with it. For pop-culture fiends like Genie Sullivan, marketing director of the Angelika Film Center Plano, tinsel trees are a wink to those halcyon days of Ozzie, Harriet and June Cleaver. For Mrs.