It's short. It's scruffy. It's practically anorexic. And this season, the Charlie Brown Christmas tree is a shining star at Alan Gibson's tree farm, in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, United States.

The cut-priced coniferous outlier among the noble balsam and Douglas firs at Ridgefield Farm and Orchard symbolizes a growing American preference for shorter, wilder Christmas trees.

"I don't know if it's a thing about the economy or if it's just that people don't want a perfect tree," Gibson says on his 13-hectare farm, where customers can pick and cut their own trees.

The scruffy conifer's nickname came from the TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas, in which Charles Schultz's beloved Peanuts character Charlie Brown elevates a scrawny little tree into a majestic thing of beauty.

About one in four US households have real Christmas trees, which cost an average of around $50 each.

Other homes opt for metal-and-plastic artificial trees, usually imported from China.

(China Daily 12/23/2012 page3)