I've learned to live with a lot of planted things--trout, quail, pheasant, rabbits, and the like--but somehow I resent "planted" Christmas trees. Even my own.
Christmas loomed large to us when I was a boy. Not only to the youngsters, but to everyone else. The end of Thanksgiving marked the beginning of the countdown to December 25th. The pie barrels that were emptied in November began to be filled again, and the pungent fogs of cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, and allspice (even rum or brandy, if you weren't a Methodist) drifted around the corners of the kitchen, as fruitcakes and pies of all descriptions, except the dreaded green tomato kind, were prepared for the holiday season.
Mothers and aunts and grandmothers, even certain sisters, had secret knitting and crocheting projects that were hurriedly stuffed into handy pillowcases when overly prying eyes came drifting by. Fathers and uncles and grandfathers spent their evening hours behind closed doors in the barn and workshops, and only the exquisite fragrances of wood shavings and varnish gave any clues as to what was going on inside.
You could always make a pretty shrewd guess, but most of us didn't--because that would take the fun out of the whole thing. The fact that certain aunts were famous for their luxurious mufflers, and certain grandmothers for mittens with ducks on the back, was sort of forgotten from the year before in the interest of mutual pleasure from the giver to the given. The fact that certain men were celebrated for their crafting of homemade knives or little chairs or red wagons was also ignored in the greater interest of Christmas-morning delight.
I was known in my family as "a good boy, even if he don't pay enough attention," which could be translated as some kind of a dreamer, or one not to be trusted with anything that required manual dexterity, a long span of attention, or good tools. In other words, I was just the right one to pick out the Christmas tree. I had an eye for symmetry, my own hatchet (the one with all the nicks in the edge), and was always fooling around in the woods anyway. We took our Christmas tree pretty seriously, so it gave me a sense of accomplishment to pick one out that pleased everybody.
The tree had to be about as high as I could reach with my outstretched arm--maybe a little higher. Bigger around than I could reach--by a lot. And not too full--so we could hang all sorts of things on the branches. Already you can see that this was the kind of job that required a lot of time spent in survey--with Jeff, my rabbit beagle, along for company, and my 20-gauge single shot along for the pot.
Cedar was not allowed because it wouldn't hold the needles, and it was prickly. Pine needles didn't last too long either and turned brown. So the choice was between hemlock or spruce--with hemlock my favorite, because I just felt hemlock was more like a real Christmas tree should be: soft, fragrant, and gentle.
I also was responsible for locating large quantities of ground pine for homemade wreaths, and berries for color--except that bittersweet was forbidden because that was a favorite of the birds when the heavy snows covered everything else.
You realize that Christmas trees, like everything else, are always better "a little farther along." And long miles were searched out for the ideal, with little or no thought for the realistic fact that the farther from home the tree is cut, the harder the job sledding it back where it is wanted. I don't suppose I really cared.
The important thing was the perfect tree. A tree that everyone stood around and admired, with lovely fragrant aunts mussing your hair and saying, "Where did you ever find such a tree?" Implying that only you had the courage and daring to venture where no Christmas-tree hunter had ever been before and had plucked this jewel from an unknown land.
Nowadays, such sweet satisfactions are almost unknown to most of us. You can't just go cut a tree from the back woodlots because they are now covered with some sort of dwellings. You can't go and cut someone else's because that's stealing, and there's something very distasteful about stealing a Christmas tree--it's just the wrong thing at the wrong time of the year.
No, you have to go buy one. Or cut one you've planted a few years ago that has probably by now assumed the stature of a pet. I've done both, and neither leaves me "joyful and rejoicing."
I've bought, at incredible prices, the so-called "balled and burlapped" trees that can theoretically be planted later or to add to the beauty of your yard. But you and I know that a properly balled and burlapped tree big enough to grace and scent a decent part of the front room will leave you with a bilateral hernia instead of a merry Christmas if you try to move it without a forklift.
However, at the proper time, carefully braced with eggnog, my tattered checkbook, and my children, I now find myself in the shopping center parking lot--stumbling around a pitch-dark stand of trees intentionally grown for profitable slaughter like hogs or beef. The girls pick out what they hope to be the least damaged of the lot, and we all wrestle it into the back of the wagon.
Christmas being Christmas, our tree, finally strategically covered with tinsel, ornaments, Santas, candy canes, and twinkling lights, manages to assume an attitude of cheer. And in a day or two even I become fond of sitting in the closing dark and watching the play of lights across its boughs.
I dearly love Christmas still. My kitchen pleasures my overromantic memories of long-lost delights with heavy draughts of cinnamon and chocolate and cloves and rum and brandy. A lot of the women I know still knit with love and tired fingers. And now and then I still imagine I can smell wood shavings and varnish.
But how I long for a sullen December afternoon, dragging a Flexible Flyer sled on a long piece of clothesline, with a nicked hatchet slapping my hip. Old Jeff poking his snow-covered nose under rabbitless brushpiles, and the fresh-cut smell of hemlock right behind me filling every breath as I whistle "Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum." It's a little off key, as I remember, but both Jeff and I felt very merry, and it didn't seem too important that neither one of us was perfect.
This story originally appeared in Hill Country by Gene Hill. Copyright (c) 1974-78 Gene A. Hill. All rights reserved.