Egg tree

Gustavus, 27 March 2026

I’ve already shared a lot about my love of eggs: Making bandboxes and Scratching eggs. And as we get closer to Easter, I thought I’d share a related tradition that I enjoy.

Egg trees, at least those indoors, aren’t really a deep set part of our folk culture — folklorist Alfred Shoemaker called them a novelty from the second half of the 19th century. And then it wasn’t until the 1950s and the publication of Katherine Milhous’s book The Egg Tree that they became a national phenomenon.

The egg tree in Katherine Milhous’s book

The number of references to “egg trees” on newspapers.com, for example, jumps from a handful in the 1940s to nearly a hundred every year in the 1950s. The real diehards surrounded them with all sorts of festive decorations, similar to the nativity decorations found around Christmas trees — what we Pennsylvania Dutch would call a putz.

Gaumer family egg tree and putz, Allentown, Lehigh County

Now, I’m certainly not out to compete with the Gaumer family’s egg tree and putz pictured above, but I do enjoy putting up more restrained versions outside and inside. Normally, I’d decorate the indoor one with plastic eggs, but this year I decided to go for traditional onion skin dyed and scratched eggs. I also blew out the insides of the eggs which was a little more of a pain to keep them submerged in the dye bath.

My scratched onion skin dyed eggs

As for the tree, it’s a goose feather tree that I assembled from a kit bought from Feather Tree Kits. They’re real goose feathers, biots as they’re called, and when wrapped in a certain way, they open up like fir needles.

My egg tree this year