What kind of farm did Taylor Swift grow up on

Taylor Swift hasn’t lived in Pennsylvania since she was 14, but her childhood home in Reading still has a lasting place in her life.

The music star released a new Christmas song, “Christmas Tree Farm,” at midnight Friday morning and her time spent at the Pa. home is front and center. The music video features footage from home videos from around the holidays of Swift growing up on the farm in Wyomissing.

It’s the first original Christmas song that Swift has released.

Swift teased the release on Thursday, revealing she wrote a new Christmas song and didn’t want to wait a full year for it to come out. As of 10 a.m. Friday, the video already had 1.8 million views on YouTube.

At the time of the release on Friday morning, Swift shared an image to Instagram of herself as a child on Pine Ridge Farm.

“I actually did grow up on a Christmas tree farm," the caption read. "In a gingerbread house, deep within the yummy gummy gumdrop forest. Where, funnily enough, this song is their national anthem.”

Swift talked about her childhood home on Pine Ridge Farm to Vogue in 2016, calling it simply “beautiful.”

In 2018, Swift made a visit back to the farm where she shared an image on Instagram of her holding a childhood photo of herself. The caption read “Take me home.”

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Okay, so... I think there’s something mysterious going on.

We all know Taylor grew up in a house in the countryside close to Reading Pennsylvania, and that her family grew christmas trees nearby. She lived there for the first 10-ish years of her life before moving to Wyomissing (a suburb in Reading).

Taylor has posted two pictures on Instagram now where you can see the words “Pine Ridge Farm” on a sign. It looks like they retouched the signs so they could be read more easily - especially the one on the single cover has way better resolution that the rest of the picture. And also... There’s 13 Christmas trees on the sign, lol. Anyways, she clearly wants people to take notice of this name.

There’s a popular farm with the same name in Pennsylvania that you can rent for weddings and stuff. But that’s been owned by the same family for decades and is not close to Reading at all, so that’s not the one.

Then I found this Facebook page: https://m.facebook.com/pages/category/Farm/Pine-Ridge-Christmas-Tree-Farm-248427091878482/ It seems like it closed a few years ago. I think this is the one - it says it’s close to Reading and there’s even people in the comments making jokes about Taylor. However, there’s no address, which I guess is because it’s closed.

So... Why would she include the name of her old farm twice and even edit the picture to make it more clear? At first I thought it was to promote the business of the new owners, but that’s clearly not the case. I’m guessing the farm has changed it’s name, since there’s no record of it on the Internet at all, other than that one old Facebook page. Is she using the old name because the new owners want the address to remain private? If so, wouldn’t it be easier to not bring up the name at all?

Or is the problem that in fact, I’m way too invested in this and should spend my time on something more productive...? Lol

On Friday (Dec. 6), Taylor Swift released “Christmas Tree Farm,” the first original Christmas song of her career. The nostalgic track clued listeners into a fact devoted Swifties have known “fir” years: that prior to moving to Nashville to pursue music, the superstar grew up on an actual Christmas tree farm in Reading, Penn. 

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While the festive factoid may be news to the casual Swift fan, her childhood surrounded by firs, pines and the Christmas spirit is something Billboard‘s Artist of the Decade has talked about a multitude of times in the press throughout her iconic career.

Below, Billboard has rounded up five times Swift “pined” for the Christmas tree farm of her childhood.

Twitter — 2019

Introducing her new song on Friday (Dec. 6), Swift tweeted, “I actually did grow up on a Christmas tree farm. In a gingerbread house, deep within the yummy gummy gumdrop forest. Where, funnily enough, this song is their national anthem.”

I actually did grow up on a Christmas tree farm. In a gingerbread house, deep within the yummy gummy gumdrop forest. Where, funnily enough, this song is their national anthem. #ChristmasTreeFarm song and video out now —https://t.co/p9Hk8blYpS pic.twitter.com/rTdGd1wIhK

— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) December 6, 2019

Esquire profile — 2014

While kicking off the promotion cycle for 1989 in the fall of 2014, Swift opened up to former Esquire writer Scott Raab about how the environment of her childhood impacted her love for the holidays. “It was such a weird place to grow up,” she said. “But it has cemented in me this unnatural level of excitement about fall and then the holiday season. My friends are so sick of me talking about autumn coming. They’re like, ‘What are you, an elf?'”

During the interview, the superstar also detailed how her father — a Merrill Lynch financial adviser — ran the farm in his spare time. “He’d tend to the farm as his hobby. He’d get up four hour early to go mow the fields on his tractor,” she said before revealing the unique way she helped around the farm as a small child. “We all had jobs. Mine was picking the praying-mantis pods off of the trees, collecting them so that the bugs wouldn’t hatch inside people’s houses…The only reason that was my job was because I was too little to help lift trees.”

Full circle moment at the VMAs — 2015

At the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, Swift’s BFF Lorde shared a sweet moment between the superstar and her younger brother Austin. “At the afterparty austin leaned down from the banquette heaving with models in vip to whisper in taylor’s ear ‘we grew up on a FARM!!’ Way cuteeeee,” Lorde wrote in a since-deleted tweet. 

Big Machine Label Group — 2013

Long before she was feuding wtih her former label home over ownership of master recordings and live performances, Swift gushed about her love for Christmas in an audio clip for Big Machine Label Group between the album cycles for Red and 1989. “I grew up on a farm,” she stated. “It was a Christmas tree farm though, so that’s why I’m sort of obsessed with Christmas. Yeah, I really love Christmas, I wish it was all year round. Just like for the feeling that everybody has — everybody’s buying gifts for each other and there’s sort of a feeling about it. But I think that the fact that I love it so much is probably because I grew up on a Christmas tree farm.”

Philadelphia Magazine interview — 2008

Back before she became one of the biggest stars on Earth, Swift sat down for an interview in her home state with Philadelphia Magazine. During the chat, the then-18-year-old spoke about her life on the farm. “It was an actual Christmas tree farm. We had, like, 15 acres. It was really fun as a kid,” she said before describing the transition from her childhood in Pennsylvania to life in Nashville.

“It was easy,” she said of the move. “In Pennsylvania, I was weird. I would play singer-songwriter nights every weekend instead of going to parties. I think it’s weird to go to parties and get drunk when you’re 13, but whatever. Then I moved to Nashville and all of the sudden I was a normal kid.”