Christmas Tree Girl: A Study in Demand
Among the many whimsical holiday items produced by Holt Howard, few have experienced a more dramatic rise in collector attention than Christmas Tree Girl. Originally sold as a Christmas-themed oil burner and air freshener, the piece reflects a fascinating moment in American decorating history. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, many households embraced the modern aluminum Christmas tree, complete with rotating color wheel illumination. While these futuristic trees offered visual excitement, they lacked one important characteristic of traditional evergreens: the smell. Christmas Tree Girl helped solve that problem by allowing pine-scented oil to be warmed through a wick system, adding the fragrance of Christmas back into a room decorated with an artificial tree.
Today, many surviving examples are displayed purely as decorative figurines, and it is easy to forget that the piece originally served a practical purpose. Yet that original function provides important context and helps explain why the design was created in the first place.
From a collector's perspective, Christmas Tree Girl presents an interesting case study because her market performance appears to be driven as much by demand as by rarity. While certainly not a common item, she does not seem dramatically scarcer than some other sought-after Holt Howard pieces. What separates Christmas Tree Girl from many contemporaries is her unusually broad appeal. She attracts not only Holt Howard collectors, but also Christmas collectors, mid-century holiday enthusiasts, anthropomorphic ceramic collectors, and buyers who simply find the design charming and visually distinctive.
Auction records over the past several years suggest that collector awareness of the piece has increased substantially. Rather than suppressing prices, the appearance of additional examples on the market appears to have been accompanied by even greater increases in demand. In many cases, prices have risen despite more examples becoming publicly visible, suggesting that the collector community has gradually discovered and embraced the piece rather than merely competing over a shrinking supply of known examples.
Christmas Tree Girl also demonstrates an important principle that appears repeatedly throughout the collecting hobby: rarity alone does not determine value. Demand, desirability, visual appeal, and collector awareness often play equally important roles. In that sense, Christmas Tree Girl serves as an excellent reminder that some of the most interesting collecting stories are not always about the rarest pieces, but about the pieces that capture collectors' imaginations.