Big John Livaditis, his son recalls, was a big man. He stood 6 feet 2 inches and weighed more than 300 pounds.
“He was actually [named] ‘John’ and he was actually big,” his son, Jimbo Livaditis, said with a grin.
John Livaditis hailed from Iowa. As a young man, he boxed in the Golden Gloves competition and in the U.S. Army. The Army brought him south, where he met his wife-to-be and settled down to operate the Zesto’s ice cream franchises spread around Atlanta and elsewhere in the southeast, his son said.
At some point, John Livadatis supposedly promised his bride “he would show her what a real, Northern Christmas tree looked like,” Jimbo Livaditis said. By that, he meant a proper tree, a Christmas tree that looked like the ones he remembered growing up in the Midwest and that looked like the ones on Christmas cards.
Now Big John Livaditis’ name is linked permanently to Christmas trees in the minds of many metro Atlantans. The Big John’s Christmas Tree lots he started and his sons now operate have been selling holiday trees in Buckhead and other parts of metro Atlanta for 62 years.
The Buckhead-based company now operates a dozen lots scattered from Brookhaven to Dunwoody to Alpharetta and employs 75 to 100 people during the Christmas rush, said Jimbo Livaditis, who co-owns and runs the business with his older brother, Lee. Big John’s gathers truckloads of trees from growers in North Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and elsewhere and brings them to its outdoor lots in the Atlanta area to sell as Christmas trees. They sell all sorts of trees: Fraser firs, Douglas firs, Nobel firs, blue spruce, pines.
In the past, they’ve operated up to 22 Christmas tree lots in a single season, Jimbo Livaditis said, but competition for Christmas tree sales from big box stores and small charity fundraisers and the general down economy has led them to scale back a bit in recent years. Still, this year, the family business expects to sell close to 10,000 trees, he said.
Holly Gardner of Buckhead says she’s been buying trees from Big John’s lots for 28 years. “I always come to Big John’s,” she said. “We always come on the Friday after Thanksgiving. It’s a family tradition.”
This year, she and her sister Mary Kathryn Metzger, who was visiting from Alabama during the holidays, were shopping for an 8-foot tree beneath the red-and-white-striped Big John’s tent in a shopping center parking lot near the corner of Piedmont and Peachtree. The two planned to have the tree delivered to a third sister as a present for her birthday.
A dozen feet away, Alex Cardon and his 4 1/2-year-old daughter, Sophie, were looking over some shorter firs on their first trip to Big John’s. Cardon said he grew up in the French Alps and Christmas trees reminded him of home. “There were a lot of Christmas trees in the Alps,” he said.
Then the Foster family passed through the big tent, looking for their perfect tree. J.D., who’s 7, quickly found one to show to his mom and dad, David and Jennifer, and 4-year-old sister, Virginia Rose. How did he know to which tree to choose? “It was saying, ‘Pick me,’ because it was wanting us to pick him,” he said.
Big John, who died in 1995, started his Christmas tree sales as a way to supplement the family’s main business, the operation of Zesto’s restaurants, Jimbo Livaditis said. Ice cream didn’t sell well during the cold weather, so one December John Livaditis decided to bring in a load of Christmas trees.
Needless to say, tree sales caught on. And, like the restaurants the Livaditises still operate, they became the kind of business that involved the whole family. Jimbo Livaditis, who’s 53 now, remembers dropping by the family’s tree lot on Peachtree Battle in the early 1960s after his Pee Wee football games. “I was probably more of a nuisance than a help,” he said.
Now his sons, John, 15, (“Little Big John,” dad says) and Lucas, 12, help customers with trees.
The tree sales business now operates nearly year-round. Jimbo Livaditis stays in touch with growers across the country throughout the year. Some, he said, are the same tree farmers his dad bought from decades ago. “I feel like Johnny Appleseed,” he said. “I get to go around and talk to these growers.”
In the fall, his family business brings thousands of Christmas trees to Atlanta for sale to families to use to brighten their homes for the holidays. After all, even when budgets tighten, many people still will buy Christmas trees.
“I think everybody still wants to celebrate Christmas and get the warm and fuzzy feeling,” he said. “Everybody wants that feeling of standing around the Christmas tree.”
