How to Get your Christmas Cactus to Bloom Year after Year

Holiday cacti like the Schlumbergera Christmas cactus are popular and easy to care for houseplants.

With proper care, a Christmas cactus can bloom for several weeks and can re-bloom year after year.

If you are wondering why your Christmas cactus won’t bloom, you come to the right place. Read on to learn what a Christmas cactus needs to grow flowers and what you can do to trigger blooming.

Related Reading: Difference between Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter cactus – Holiday cactus care.

Make a Christmas Cactus Bloom

First of all, your Christmas cactus plant needs to be mature enough to flower. Holiday cactus plants won’t bloom until they reach 2 or 3 years. By then, they can produce beautiful, showy flowers.

In nature, the Christmas cactus is triggered to bloom when the days shorten and the temperature drops.

You can simply wait and let nature do its thing. Fall will set in and shorten the daylight hours. Your plant can flower by itself without any help.

Christmas Cactus Flowers

The name says it all, the Christmas cactus naturally blooms around the Christmas holiday season.

The good thing is that it isn’t a once-a-lifetime bloom, the Christmas cactus can flower every year. Multiple times a year even!

Christmas cactus blooms can last for several weeks.

The outer leaves of the flowers of the Christmas cactus curl back towards the stem giving them an interesting tubular shape. They look somewhat similar to the flowers on a fuchsia plant.

There are many different hybrids of the Schlumbergera holiday cactus. They bloom in all shades of red, pink, orange, yellow, and white.

Read More: 3 Ways to Propagate a Christmas Cactus.

Cut Back on Watering to Encourage Blooms

To encourage flowering, reduce watering frequency in late September, early October. Water just enough to make sure the leaves don’t shrivel up completely.

Once the flower buds appear, gradually increase watering to return to the normal care routine.

Dark Treatment to Trigger Christmas Cactus to Bloom

Christmas cactus plants grow flowers when they get less light as the days get shorter in winter.

You can give your Christmas cactus a dark treatment to trigger it to bloom and grow flowers indoors.

A Christmas cactus won’t start the blooming process if it gets too much light. A dark treatment means total darkness.

Make sure there is no artificial light. Even if it’s just a night light near your plant or a street light outside the window it can prevent flowering.

Place your holiday cactus in a dark room or closet for 12-14 hours daily. You can also place a box over your plant each night around 6 p.m. and remove it the next morning when you wake up around 8 a.m.

When to Put Christmas Cactus in Dark to Trigger Blooms

By giving your Christmas cactus a dark treatment you regulate light and temperature and make your holiday cactus bloom at a specific time, such as exactly at Christmas.

To induce flowering, start the dark treatment 6-8 weeks before the desired bloom time. You can stop the dark treatment when flower buds appear.

To get your plant to bloom at Christmas, give it darkness in October/November.

Cool Temperatures

To help trigger blooms, provide your plant with cooler night temperatures. If possible, keep it somewhere where it is in the range of 50-60 °F.

If you can’t get the temperature cool enough, increase the dark time to compensate.

Christmas Cactus Dropping Flower Buds

It is perfectly normal for your Christmas cactus to drop a few flower buds.

A holiday cactus plant knows how many flowers it can grow. It will drop an occasional bud if it has too many and doesn’t have the strength to fully grow them all.

But what if a lot of flower buds are falling off?

Usually, the reason that buds or flowers drop is that the plant goes through a sudden change in temperature or light.

Holiday cacti like things to stay the same. They get stressed when they get moved. Their stress shows when the buds or flowers drop.

This also explains why many plants drop buds right after purchase. Traveling from the growers’ greenhouse to the store, then to your home was too much movement.

On top of that, the flower buds will always turn towards the light. When the plant gets moved, the buds keep turning, until they eventually fall off.

So don’t move your plant too much.

Other reasons for buds or flowers to drop from your Christmas cactus could be overwatering, or the temperature being too high, or the humidity too low.

Further reading: Common Christmas Cactus Problems + Easy Fixes!