Harvesting the Holiday

Dade City’s Ergle Christmas Tree Farm Helps Holiday Spirit Grow

- PAUL CATALA

FOR AT LEAST A DECADE, Tony and Tracy Sanderson have driven roughly eight miles south for their Christmas centerpiece.

The Trilby couple — and in the past with their now-grown son, Blain— have made Dade City’s Ergle Christmas Tree Farm their go-to annual stop for a yuletide conifer.

“It’s more personable than just going to Walmart or a local chain. You have the same clientele every year, they come for the tradition,” says Tracy Sanderson. “You see some of the same people each year who are from the area. It’s family, it’s community and support for a local business.”

Now in its 34th year, Ergle Christmas Tree Farm has become for some families as much of a holiday tradition as Christmas lights, dinners and presents. At any time throughout the year, there are between 15,000 and 20,000 trees growing on part of the farm’s 25 acres offU.S. Highway 301 in southeastern Hernando County.

The tree farm was founded in 1986 by Dade City native Tony Harris and his wife Debbie Harris, a seventh-generation Floridian who moved to Dade City when she was 5. Debbie’s father, Omar Ergle – now deceased – began a tree farm in 1982 in another part of the city and when it closed in 1998, the Harrises carried on at the new location.

“When I was young, there weren’t many Christmas tree stands in Florida,” says Debbie Harris. “My father, it wasn’t illegal or a problem then, he’d go out in the woods get a turkey, dress it and he’d have a nice cedar tree in the trunk that he had cut. That’s all I ever saw until we started the farm.”