In the folklore of Taylor Swift's life, there are certain details and events that have come up repeatedly over the years. Some are referenced repeatedly in her lyrics, but stay off-topic in interviews (like certain early events in her relationship with Joe Alwyn—the initial attraction while she was seeing someone else, the dive bar date, the big rooftop talk), others are part of her mythology in song and interview form—like her childhood growing up on a Christmas tree farm.
In addition to being the subject of her 2019 Christmas song, this oh-so-quaint detail is a very real part of Swift's origin story. Before her family moved to Nashville so she could pursue her music career, the Swifts really did live on a Christmas tree farm in West Reading, Pennsylvania.
A full decade before she released "Christmas Tree Farm" the song, Swift opened up about her experiences growing up on said farm during an interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show. In the clip, which has resurfaced in time for the holidays, Swift shared that she had a job on the farm: collecting praying mantises from the Douglas fir trees.
"They lay eggs and they form pods on the Douglas firs Christmas trees," she explained. "It's their favorite tree to infest."
"That's where I would come in," she continued. "I would walk around the Christmas trees all day and pick them off and put them in, like, a little basket ... so people wouldn't have bugs in their houses."
Swift continued to reference her Christmas tree farm days over the years, including during a 2014 interview with Esquire, in which attributed the experience with her eternal love of the Christmas season.
"It was such a weird place to grow up," she said. "But it has cemented in me this unnatural level of excitement about fall and then the holiday season."
And then, of course, there's "Christmas Tree Farm" the song, which Swift released in 2019, along with a music video featuring real-life footage from the Swift family's holiday home videos back in the day.
