![]() ![]() I mean truckloads and truckloads.”īased in sunny Riverside, California, Peak Seasons starts with paper and a grinder. “I don’t want to share, but we sell lots of flock. Leonard says they're the largest manufacturer of flock in the United States and Europe. The Peak Seasons recipe includes paper pulp as fiber, corn starch as adhesive, and boron as a flame retardant-there’s a safety benefit to flocking.Īnd the company makes a lot of it. So what exactly is flocking? At its core, flocking means attaching tiny fibers to a surface to create texture (the process is also used in fashion, home decor, and crafts). The West Coast, the South, and the Southeast, the vast majority of it is sold in those zones.” The Science of Flocking “Sunbelt states use a lot of it because there’s no snow there,” Leonard tells Mental Floss. Flocking itself, however, has retained a level of appeal. Such home kits are not so popular these days, says Tom Leonard, owner of Peak Seasons, one of the country's largest manufacturers of Christmas tree lots supplies and tree flock. General Mills marketed Sno-Flok home kits, to be applied using a gun that attached to a vacuum cleaner. A 1929 issue of Popular Mechanics recommended varnish, corn starch, and flakes of the silicate mineral mica.īut tree flocking as we know it really caught on in the late 1950s and 1960s, along with aluminum trees and other glitzy (if not natural-looking) decor of the post-war boom. We’ve been trying to get that snowy look on Christmas trees for longer than you might think, dating back to the 1800s using substances like flour or cotton. Here’s how professionals manufacture this Christmas miracle. And yet, when decorated and lit up, there’s something beautiful and warmly nostalgic about a well-flocked Christmas tree. That’s what’s happening when you adorn a tree with artificial snow, otherwise known as flocking. Of the many curious holiday traditions (figgy pudding? wassailing?), one of the oddest has to be spraying down small trees with a mixture of adhesive and cellulose fibers to satisfy our longing for a white Christmas.
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