Heavy may receive a commission if you purchase a product through a link on this page.

15 Best Pencil Christmas Trees: Your Ultimate List

Choosing a pencil Christmas tree can mean the difference between your home looking festive or simply looking cluttered. Christmas trees always take up more room than we expect so let’s take a look at the best pencil Christmas trees of 2023 that are built to fit into tight spaces. Christmas is only a couple of weeks away so don’t wait!

If you don’t like this skinny look, you can still save space with a half Christmas tree or go bold with a vintage aluminum Christmas tree.

Price: $ – $
15 Listed Items

What's the Best Pencil Tree Size for My Space?

Height is important, but it's actually the width of the tree that makes life difficult.

A typical 6.5-foot-tall Christmas tree, like this realistic Douglas Fir from National Tree, can have a base diameter of 49 inches.

But a 6.5-foot-tall pencil tree, this Champagne Tinsel Tree from Vickerman for example, can have a diameter of only 27 inches. 

Pencil Christmas trees can cut your tree's footprint by more than half. If a traditionally shaped Christmas tree had a width of 20 inches, it would only be about three feet tall.

With slim trees, you can still get all the height you want without losing a huge portion of your room to your Christmas tree.

Want a Foolproof Way to Choose the Right Size? Measure.

Understanding what size is right for you requires some measuring. Just like they recommend for how to select a real tree, breaking out the tape measure is important. 

The best thing to do is block it out. Get some masking tape and a measuring tape and start blocking out the size of the trees you're looking at to see how they fit into your space.

Another way to save space is to go for a half Christmas tree which is literally only the front half of a tree so you can set it against a wall or in a corner to half the space your tree takes up

Are Slim Christmas Trees Easier to Store?

Yes, but even a pencil tree is an awkward shape to have to store.

If space tight trying to display a Christmas tree, chances are storage is also tight. Taking down the tree can be stressful for this reason, but since I stopped trying to DIY something and got a Christmas tree storage container, disassembling the tree isn't as frustrating and the tree takes up less space in my attic.

Which Style of Skinny Christmas Tree is Right for Me?

Artificial Christmas tree selection has changed a lot since I was small and now there are two basic styles: flat-needed bottlebrush branches like the ones we grew up with or 3D branches that have been molded from actual pine trees. 

The needles of molded trees are rounded, soft, and just plain realistic. The advantage of new ultra-realistic trees is that these modern trees can fool the eye and appear to be a real tree, which is great if you've always had real trees in the past but have to make the switch to plastic.

(And there are plenty of reasons to make the switch from real including maintenance, needle clean up, and the fact that many people suffer from very common Christmas tree allergies.)

The only disadvantage of plastic molded trees is that because they have a more realistic look, you often can't hang ornaments on the very end of branches, just like a real tree. And while they're still strengthened with wire and pliable, the thickness of the branches limits the range of motion.

If you've grown up with artificial trees and want something with that traditional look, there are still plenty of flat needle bottlebrush trees so you can stick with what you know works. It all really depends on where your priorities are in terms of tree appearance and ornaments.