The aluminum Christmas tree: a Chicago patent no one remembers, and a trademark no one owns

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · September 20, 2026

Ask a collector who invented the aluminum Christmas tree and the answer comes back fast: Evergleam. The patent record says a rival across town filed first and lost the market anyway, and the name on the box that everyone means when they say “aluminum tree” was never trademarked by the company that made it famous.

What makes a tree aluminum, not just silver

An artificial tree that folds up and comes back out of a box every December is not a new idea. In 1882, August Wengenroth of Troy, New York patented an “imitation Christmas-tree” with a trunk covered in ground cork, detachable wire branches wrapped in green chenille, and candle sockets built into the branch tips — the chenille was treated with alum specifically so it would not catch fire from the candles it was designed to hold. That patent, US 255,902, is still on file, and it shows up seventy-six years later as a cited prior-art reference on the first aluminum tree patent this guide is actually about.

The aluminum version solved the same fire problem a different way: metal does not burn, so a magazine writer could suggest in 1937 that spraying a real tree with aluminum paint made a passable substitute, and by the mid-1950s a Chicago outfit called Modern Coatings, Inc. was manufacturing trees built from metal foil rather than paint. Sears marketed the finished product as fireproof, and the material solved a problem the format had never fully solved: strings of incandescent lights on bare metal branches are a short-circuit risk, so manufacturers sold a separate accessory instead — a floor-mounted, motorized color wheel that shone rotating colored light up onto the tree from below. The Henry Ford holds one of these, a Sears house-branded “Colortone” unit stamped “PAT. PEND.,” dated to 1960–1965.

The branches themselves are the real invention. Each one is a metal rod wrapped in a strip of foil that has been cut into a row of narrow fingers along one edge, so the strip fans out into something that reads as needles from across a room. Two competing versions of that idea reached the US Patent Office within two years of each other, and only one of the two companies behind them is still a household reference today.

The patent that actually came first

US Patent 2,893,149, “Artificial Tree,” was filed September 29, 1958 by Clarence D. Reece and Paul Nathan and assigned to Modern Coatings, Inc. of Chicago. It describes a trunk with sockets arranged in angled groups, into branches of a single uniform length; the taper comes entirely from the angle of each socket, not from cutting shorter branches for the top of the tree. Granted July 7, 1959, this is the patent that Aluminum Specialty Company of Manitowoc, Wisconsin licensed to build the tree it branded Evergleam.

US Patent 2,889,650, also titled “Artificial Tree,” was filed almost two years earlier, on December 12, 1956, by Chester P. Hankus and assigned to his own company, Revlis Co. of the Chicago area. Its solution runs the opposite direction: branch rods of visibly varying length, mounted in spiraling, vertically offset rings of holes so neighboring branches do not collide, with foil fingers spiraled around each rod individually rather than cut flat. It was granted June 9, 1959, a month before the patent Evergleam would build on.

How one license became a name nobody owns

Aluminum Specialty Company was already fifty years old in 1959, having made other aluminum goods out of Manitowoc since roughly 1909. A company scout named Tom Gannon reportedly spotted a Modern Coatings tree in a Chicago store window in December 1958; by March 1959 Aluminum Specialty had a licensed version ready for the American Toy Fair, and the company officially branded it Evergleam in 1960. It wholesaled for $11.25 and retailed for about $25 — not cheap for 1960, when a movie ticket ran under a dollar.

The tree was a hit on a scale Revlis and every other licensee never matched: Aluminum Specialty produced more than a million trees over the following decade and held an estimated 60 to 65 percent of the US and Canadian aluminum tree market through the 1960s. The brand name did what strong brand names sometimes do to a whole product category — sellers today use “Evergleam” the way they use “Kleenex,” as a stand-in for any aluminum Christmas tree regardless of who actually made it.

What the company never did, at least on the federal record, is register that name. A search of federal trademark filings turns up exactly one application for EVERGLEAM tied to Christmas trees, and it was not filed by Aluminum Specialty Company. It was filed on January 9, 2002 by Playing Mantis, Inc., a toy and collectibles company better known for reissuing Johnny Lightning die-cast cars, presumably to cover a reproduction tree line of its own. The application was granted two extensions, then abandoned on January 31, 2005 when nobody filed the required statement of use. No one has registered it since. The name most associated with this category, as of this writing, belongs to nobody in particular.

The branch styles and colors Evergleam actually made

The Wisconsin Historical Museum, which holds original Evergleam trees and company material, credits Aluminum Specialty with “dozens” of tree models across four basic branch styles: Straight Needle, Frosty, Swirl, and Fountain, in heights from 2 to 8 feet. Roughly 75 to 80 percent of all Evergleams shipped in silver, the rest in green, gold, and pink. The company also built the accessories around the tree — revolving stands, color wheels, projector lights including one called the Sata-Lite, and a combined Revolving Tri-Lite stand.

A separate collector reference lists variant and model names that do not map cleanly onto that four-style list — among them Bow Tip, Frosty Fountain (as one compound name, not two separate styles), and Slimline, alongside colors including Bluefrost, Burgundy-Blue, and Peacock. Whether that is the same naming scheme sliced differently or a wholly separate later product line is not resolved by anything cited here; see the disagreements section below.

The practical point for anyone holding a tree: branch style and color narrow down which Evergleam line it came from, but neither one dates the tree by itself. Aluminum Specialty ran most of its models for years at a stretch, and colors were reissued rather than retired on a fixed schedule.

How to tell a real one

The most reliable test has nothing to do with the branches: it is the paperwork and the stamps. Genuine Evergleams and their contemporaries typically shipped with an instruction sheet, a stamp on the box, a stamp on the stand, a stamp on the center pole, and often an inspection slip tucked inside. A tree with all of that intact, in a box that matches the tree's own color and size, is about as close to a documented original as this category gets.

The construction itself is a second, physical test, and it is the one this guide can verify from the patents directly rather than from a collector's word. Pull a branch and look at how the tree achieves its taper. If the branches shrink in length as you move up the pole, you are holding something built on the Revlis approach — graduated branch lengths mounted in spiraling rings. If the branches stay roughly the same length from bottom to top and the taper instead comes from the angle each branch sits at, you are holding something in the Evergleam-licensed family: Aluminum Specialty's own trees, and licensees such as PECO of Austell, Georgia, which built its own line under the same Reece and Nathan patent.

• Box, stand, pole, and inspection-slip stamps present and matching the tree's stated color and height
• Foil fingers cut and shaped into the strip itself, not glued-on plastic or bristle needles
• Branch length uniform (Evergleam-licensed family) or visibly graduated (Revlis family) — either is consistent with an original of some brand; a mix of both on one tree is not
• A center pole with drilled, numbered holes rather than a smooth pole with generic slots
• Paper storage sleeves over the branches, a detail several original lines shipped with to keep branches from flattening in storage

Why pink is the color to doubt

Pink was never part of Evergleam's standard silver production run, and one specialist dealer in the category calls pink “the rarest color of aluminum tree ever made.” That rarity is what makes it worth extra scrutiny. A December 2024 report describes sellers spray-painting ordinary silver trees pink and passing them off as vintage originals, precisely because a genuine pink tree can be worth many times an equivalent silver one.

Pink was not exclusive to Evergleam. Other manufacturers, including Sparkler and Consolidated Novelty, made their own pink lines, so pink alone does not point to Aluminum Specialty specifically — it narrows the field to a small handful of makers who chose to run the color at all, which is its own useful check against a seller's brand claim.

What actually ended the craze

The popular version of this story has one scene doing all the work: A Charlie Brown Christmas airs on CBS in December 1965, Lucy tells Charlie Brown to get “a big, shiny aluminum tree, maybe painted pink,” the special becomes a beloved annual rerun, and the joke supposedly killed the format overnight.

Production data does not support the overnight part. Aluminum Specialty Company's own run continued at scale through the back half of the 1960s — Wikipedia's sourced figure has the company producing over a million trees across the 1959-to-1969 span, which covers four full Christmas seasons after the special aired. The Wisconsin Historical Museum, which holds the company's own material, dates the actual end of tree production to 1971-72, and attributes it plainly to declining sales rather than to the special itself. A more careful secondary account agrees that the special's role was contributing rather than singular, describing sales as having “tapered off” through the following decade rather than collapsing in one season.

None of that means the special had no effect — a prime-time program that frames your product as a punchline is not nothing. It means the honest version of the story is a six-to-seven-year fade tangled up with changing taste, not a single broadcast that ended a business overnight.

The other makers, and how to spot them

Evergleam had real competition, most of it clustered around Chicago and the industrial Midwest. Revlis (Chester Hankus, Chicago-area, marketed as “the Cadillac of Christmas Trees”) ran its own patents and its own colors, including Pink Champagne, Blue-Green, Gold-Silver, and Black Diamond. PECO, short for Production Engineering Company, worked out of Austell, Georgia — a Southern outlier in a category otherwise concentrated up north — and licensed the same Reece and Nathan patent Evergleam used, building non-tapered, cylindrical trees with three branches per drilled row and instructions printed straight on the box rather than as a separate sheet. Sparkler and Consolidated Novelty both ran their own pink and silver lines. A long tail of smaller, regional, and short-lived makers — Star Band, C. Sincere, US Silver Tree Co., Tomar, and others — round out the category, most of them now identifiable only by a stamped name on the pole or stand.

None of this is a reason to distrust a tree just because it is not stamped Evergleam. It is a reason to check the stamp at all: brand, model line, and color together narrow a tree's age and origin far better than “aluminum Christmas tree” alone, the way a ceramic Christmas tree's base marks narrow its maker rather than its date.

What they sell for now

By 1989, these trees were common enough at yard sales to go for a quarter, according to contemporary reporting on the category's collapse in value. That has reversed sharply since a Wisconsin photography book, Season's Gleamings (2004), helped spark a collector revival built largely on eBay.

Current asking prices cluster by size, color, and completeness: tabletop models generally run $30 to $300; full-size 5-to-8-foot silver trees with original stand and box run roughly $150 to $625; gold and pom-pom-branch models push higher, with one 6.5-foot gold pom-pom tree reported sold at $4,050. Pink remains the outlier. A seven-foot pink Evergleam, dented, is reported to have sold on eBay in December 2024 for $10,750 — a figure this guide is repeating from a secondary report on that sale rather than a primary auction record, and it should be read that way rather than as a confirmed comparable.

Color wheels and rotating stands are their own small market, generally $50 to $485 depending on condition and whether the original bulb and cord are intact — worth budgeting for separately, since a tree bought without one is missing the accessory it was designed to be seen with.

Where the records disagree

• When Aluminum Specialty Company actually stopped making trees. The Wisconsin Historical Museum gives 1971–72; a general history source frames 1959–1972 as the primary popularity window without naming a precise final season. The two are close, not identical.
• What the branch-style names actually refer to. The Wisconsin Historical Museum names four styles — Straight Needle, Frosty, Swirl, Fountain. A specialist collector reference instead lists model names including a combined “Frosty Fountain,” alongside “Bow Tip” and “Slimline.” Nothing consulted for this guide reconciles the two lists into one taxonomy.
• The pink Evergleam's reported $10,750 sale. This guide found that figure only in a secondary report describing a completed eBay sale, not in a specialist auction house's own lot record. Treat it as reported, not verified.
• Whether Aluminum Specialty Company ever held any trademark rights in “Evergleam.” A business can acquire enforceable trademark rights through use alone, without ever filing federally. The absence of a federal filing under that name before 2002 does not prove the original maker held no claim during its own era — only that no registered claim survives today for anyone to point to.
• The company's own corporate thread past 1972. Newell Company's 1984 acquisition records list the Manitowoc target as “Aluminum Specialty Company/Foley,” a year after Newell acquired neighboring Mirro. Whether that is the same continuous company that built Evergleams simply operating under an expanded name, or a restructured successor, is not settled by anything cited here.

Still coming down from the attic

Nobody involved in 1959 could have priced a tree that would spend the 1990s selling for pocket change and the 2020s selling for the price of a used car. Aluminum Specialty Company folded its tree line by the early 1970s having outsold a rival that filed first, and the name it built its whole business on sat unclaimed by anyone for the next fifty years. What survived was the object itself, still turning up in attics and estate sales, still identifiable by the same stamped pole and the same two competing ways of faking a pine needle — whichever one happens to be under the foil.

For the glass ornaments that spent the same decade hanging on trees like these, see the Shiny Brite guide. For another mid-century object whose name says less about its history than its patent does, see the Emeralite banker's lamp and the Aladdin lamp trademark split. Or see every guide in Field Guides.