A dark red, fat-fender, American pickup truck with a freshly cut pine tree in the bed. It’s become a standard holiday icon, like a snowman or reindeer. Some folks say that there is no real origin to the truck’s tale; that it’s just a nostalgic image from long ago. No Coca-Cola conspiracy theories. Just an ideaf rom a simpler time, when families would go out and chop down their own trees, long before commercialism consumed Christmas.
Yet the Christmas truck was not a common design 20 years ago, so it must have started somewhere. Some point to the Hallmark channel’s 2017 made-for-TV movie ‘Christmas in Evergreen‘. Apparently, the protagonist drives a 1953 Ford F-100 pickup, all decked out for the holidays. Could that movie (and it’s two sequels) be responsible for the ubiquitous Christmas truck?
A search on Reddit or Google will find folks claiming that the interior design trend called Farmhouse Chic really popularized the Christmas truck. That trend used re-claimed, weathered boards from barns as interior elements in homes. Some folks would pre-scratch freshly painted surfaces, to give the illusion of decades-old patina. The Christmas truck fits in so well in that motif.
We don’t know where this trend started; but we like it. Whether it’s a Chevy, Ford or Dodge, a post-war pickup truck in red-oxide paint, white-wall tires and a shiny chrome grille makes us think of the good old days, of an Americana we never even lived through.
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