Sometimes you just need to brighten up your world and what better way to do that than with a Christmas tree!
Christmas trees can make for a great center piece in your base or town, bringing in some color and nostalgic joy for everyone.
In this article I’ll show you how to make a Christmas tree in Minecraft in my own specific style, as well as how to decorate it and give you some ideas how to go about it.
There’s an endless world of possibilities!
Choosing a Tree
Like with any Christmas decorating, the biggest concern will always be picking the perfect tree.
Do you need something small and simple or some large center piece that will tower over your base or town?
Depending on what you’re going for you can pick an already existing tree in the world or plant an existing type of tree.
If you have the resources and time you can make a custom tree completely on your own from scratch using whatever blocks you have at your disposal.
Using an Existing Tree
Building a tree from scratch can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a lot of space or you’re limited on resources.
A quick solution is to decorate an already existing tree. Depending where your base is located you’d easily have an entire array of tree types to chose from.
My personal favorites are spruce trees because they resemble typical Christmas trees the most. You could also use a dark oak, regular oak, birch, or any other tree you may fancy, but spruce looks closest to what we’re trying to make.
If you don’t have the tree you want in the exact location you want it in, you can easily take a sapling and plant it where you want it to be. Just chop down the type of tree of your choice and wait for the saplings to drop.
To speed up the growth of the sapling you can use bone meal. If you want the tree to be taller than average you can force it to grow into a larger variant.
To do so place a solid blocks, like dirt or cobblestone, around the sapling. Use bone meal on the sapling and the blocks will force the tree to grow a bit taller than usual.
How to Grow Large Spruce Trees in Minecraft
Large Spruce trees can be found in colder biomes, but did you know you can grow one from any four spruce saplings?
Place the saplings in a square on dirt (or any dirt variants) and use bone meal. You will get one of the many variants of giant spruce trees that way that you can decorate.
Just make sure there’s enough space for the tree and nothing is in the way for it to grow.
Building a Custom Christmas Tree
Building a tree from scratch in Minecraft can be pretty tricky, especially if you want a big fancy tree. So we will cover them in sizes.
The smallest and simplest tree you can build yourself would be a tree with a one block wide trunk. What would make this tree look bigger would be its canopy.
Again, my favorites are spruce trees for these kind of builds, so I mostly use spruce logs and spruce leaves when building.
If you don’t want something as big or thick as a normal tree, you can also place a regular fence under the leaves before building your tree.
Usually the taller the tree is the more your canopy will have to spread out toward the bottom.
If a single block isn’t wide enough for you, you can always increase the width. A width of 2×2 or 3×3 I consider to be almost perfect, especially because 3×3 gives you a center in which you can position your star in the end.
Of course, you can always go bigger than that.
Once I decide on a size I like, I add some roots to the bottom, both around the tree and in the dirt around it.
When you’ve got your trunk, you’ll need a lot of Leaves. I’m using spruce leaves like I did before. Due to the height of the tree, I first try to map out how I want the leaves to branch out by doing only one side and looking at it from a distance.
When I’m happy with how it looks I copy it on the other sides and fill in the gaps. I keep my tree almost entirely symmetrical, but you don’t have to.
Feel free to experiment with the shapes.
Decorating a Christmas Tree in Minecraft
Once your tree is ready it’s time to get creative! There’s endless options and ways to decorate a tree.
It can be difficult choosing what to decorate your tree with, because not many things can be placed directly on leaf blocks. Lanterns, soul lanterns, candles, and many others are not an option.
The easiest way is to use colored wool blocks. They can be used as baubles, ornaments, and even presents under the tree. Though they are large and look clunky on the smaller trees.
You can also go a natural route. There’s quite a few blocks you can place on the trees, like Froglight, Shroomlight, Moss, Vines, and Glowing Lichen. Of these harvesting and growing Vines is the easiest.
My way to get around the chunky décor problem, personally, is using item frames.
Item frames can be placed on the sides of leaf blocks and they can hold virtually any other block or item in the game. This way I can still use the colorful wool blocks (other options could be terracotta or concrete blocks) without them taking up too much space.
Additionally, if you have glowing item frames you can use them to light up the tree a bit as well.
Otherwise I still utilize floating candles. Candles cannot be placed on leaf blocks, but they will not get broken if there is no block below them, making them the perfect magical light for our tree!
Finally, consider using custom heads for different ornaments or even presents.
On larger trees I use wool blocks to make the ornaments that surround the tree.
Feel free to play around with color palettes and other kinds of blocks. Most decoration blocks cannot be placed directly on the leaves, but just like candles some of them can float around.
For my own big tree I switched the color palette to an array of blues and different shades of white. Instead of just using wool blocks, I also added smooth quartz along the white wool.
With the blue wool blocks I added small amethyst buds on the top.
The star I built with sea lanterns and quartz stairs around it.
Beneath the tree and spiraling around it are end rods. Since end rods are a bit harder to get a hold of, candles and colored glass panes would have been my next choice.
Additional Décor
A tree just by itself is not much, so feel free to spread the color and cheer around it. Using your wool you can build presents under the trees.
If you have colored shulker boxes you can place them down to take up less space as well.
You can make whole builds around or nearby it. From little market stands to Santa’s workshop using our very own furniture building guide, the sky is your limit.
