DAVIS -- In this tiny fishing village, where generations caught crabs inside wire-mesh traps, you can't make a nickel on the tasty crustaceans anymore, not with cheap seafood from Malaysia flooding the North Carolina coast.
So a few years back, Neal "Nicky" Harvey cut up some of the crab pot wire lying around his shop and built a small Christmas tree. Then another. Then a dozen. Then a thousand. Now this Christmas, Fisherman Creations will send out roughly 150,000 crab-pot trees from Raleigh to New York, from Smithfield to Texas.
It took the ingenuity of an old-time crab-pot maker to transform a sheet of green mesh, a material that looks a good bit like chicken wire, into a piece of holiday charm. At 66, Harvey has seen his fishing net business dry up, watched crab-pot demand fall from 3,000 to 300 a year and lived to see the landmark Sanitary Restaurant and Fish Market in Morehead City serve shrimp from Taiwan. With these trees, Fisherman Creations can export relics of a fading Down East culture.

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