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The fir of inflation is real.
A perfectly shaped 20-year-old, 12½-foot-tall western white fir is priced at a towering $1,100 at the Greenwich Village sidewalk Christmas tree lot operated by the Romp family.
Yet it’s not the most expensive Yuletide tree sold in New York City this year. The Post found a 14-foot Fraser fir Friday tucked away and still wrapped at a lot on Tenth Avenue and 44th in Hell’s Kitchen listed for $1,200.
But the Village specimen might be the city’s “most beautiful,” opined tree patriarch Billy Romp, 68, of Middlebury, Vt., whose clan has sold Christmas trees at the corner of Jane Street and Eighth Avenue every year since 1988.
Their trophy tree checks all the boxes of a high-class luxury model.
“The largest trees are in the shortest supply, especially now in the fourth year of a Christmas tree shortage,” said the evergreen entrepreneur, before rhapsodizing about his white fir’s many glowing attributes.
“Even in normal times, this is a grade-A, premium-plus tree, a very Christmas-tree shape, very full, very dense.”
The Cadillac of conifers reflects nationwide trends that have driven up costs of Christmas trees in recent years. The Romp lot also offers a copse of Christmas trees about 10 feet tall hovering around $800 to $900 each.
Romp said the financial crisis of 2007-08 caused disruptions in Christmas tree farming that consumers are paying for today.
“There are fewer trees and they are more expensive,” agreed Kevin Hammer, a Bensonhurst native who manages Evergreen East, a Wisconsin-based Christmas tree cooperative that bills itself as “New York’s finest Christmas tree sellers.”
“It’s good for the chain stores, good for the producers and bad for the public.”
Hammer said recent trends have made it harder than ever to move top-of-the-line trees. Wealthy New York bankers and hedge fund managers who casually dropped big bucks on oversized spruces in seasons past are “still working from home or they’ve gone south to Boca and they aren’t coming back. They went wherever else they got places.”
The Romp tree-selling dynasty says deep roots in the West Village will help them weather any crisis.
Romp’s son, Henry, 30, has spent every December “since I was six months old” on this street corner. Grandsons Colby, 17, and Charlie Bishop, 11, make it three generations of the family living and working at the spot each Christmastime.
The Romps sleep in campers parked on Jane Street, while neighbors offer a spare bed or a place to shower in times of need.
Billy Romp wrote a 2008 book called “Christmas on Jane Street” about his relationship with his daughter, Ellie, as it unfolded each winter on their tree lot.
Local musician Carol McCann penned a Christmas carol, also called “Christmas on Jane Street,” dedicated to the family’s impact on the community. The Romps bring their own instruments and often perform in front of their trees.
They close up shop at midnight on Christmas Eve and begin the five-hour drive back to Middlebury.
“We get home early Christmas morning,” said Henry Romp, “and put up our last tree of the year.”
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