WE-CUT (O, TANNENBAUM)
BY RICKY FAY
The de facto launch of our holiday season and another capital-T Tradition was the annual trip past the outskirts of North Plains to select and harvest our family Christmas tree. To hear my parents tell it, as newlyweds they'd been content to purchase one from a lot in town, but once they'd had kid(s), something more seasonally festive was called for. So we'd bundle up against the cold — which always felt more extreme in the countryside for some reason — and venture out to rural pastures, for what felt like the taming of the wild frontier.
Our enthusiasm for the event (coupled with the fact that we kids were crammed together in the back seat for an hour) came spilling out as unbridled chaos. To help mitigate this madness, our mother orchestrated a sort of sacred, unspoken ceasefire by introducing the Tradition of singing Christmas carols to and from our destination once we'd left the freeway. This hallowed armistice not only channeled our energies in a less destructive direction so our father could pilot the car in relative peace, it also crafted an atmosphere of communal holiday joy and a calm before the hurricane to come. It was during these rides that we learned the Latin words to O Come, All Ye Faithful and consistently brought tears to our mother's eyes by inadvertently but enthusiastically butchering the melody of her favorite Christmas song, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. She also taught us a secular carol from her Massachusetts childhood: Hardrock, Coco, and Joe1. Because this one was something we'd learned and treasured from a young age, it never occurred to us until we were much older that these weren't lyrics anyone else in Oregon had ever heard before.
The U-Cut Christmas Tree Farm where we offered our annual patronage was a family-run operation. I can't recall ever exchanging first names with them, but they always seemed to recognize us, though our relations were limited to this once-a-year transaction. Perhaps that anonymous, folksy charm was baked into their business plan? They had a wood stove-warmed shack away from their house, and it was here that the business end of our Tradition was conducted. Our father would check in and go through the motions of pretending to haggle with the owners over the price of this year's crop, before emerging and flashing us his inevitable thumbs-up to begin our tumultuous selection process.
Options were spread across several fields of trees. Depending on how late into the season we arrived, specimens closest to the parking lot were often either too young, too crooked, or too sparsely-needled, meaning we had to trek deeper across the property, searching for that one perfect tree. Of course, this was all subjective. The farm specialized in fir trees and our father made it clear he preferred the Douglas variety, while our mother seemed to favor Nobles or Grands. Given the opportunity to weigh in, I regularly leaned toward the rare, fragrant Blue Spruces. My siblings were wild cards, and both thoroughly enjoyed wreaking havoc on our yearly decision-making process with their votes, which could be bought, influenced, manipulated, or changed on a whim at the last second 'just because.'
There were no fixed rules to the family polling procedure when it came to choosing our tree. Some years a majority vote would suffice, others when a plurality was the best we could hope for. One traumatic December, when our incessant bickering and refusals to compromise caused our patient father to reach his breaking point, we were sternly herded back to the parking lot and we departed without making a purchase. By the time we passed treeless through the city of North Plains, the final drop of Christmas Spirit had been all but wrung out of the vehicle. Everyone was fuming, silent, or bawling, and Dad pulled into the parking lot of a local restaurant, where he proceeded to deliver perhaps the most legendary scolding we kids had ever received as a group. Chastened, we then returned to the farm, where we made our selection in near-record time.
My earliest memory of cutting down our tree was similarly fraught with permanent emotional scarring and psychological tripwires, albeit for a different reason. I was maybe five years old, which meant there had to have been siblings in tow, although I don't recall how they reacted to the sudden emergency. We were at the bottom of a gentle, wooded incline when I suddenly felt the rumble of a brewing bowel movement. I glanced with consternation toward the parking lot — which to my eyes looked as high and far away as the peak of Everest — and calculated there was just no way I was going to make it there in time. So, while my mother hiked back to the car in search of paper towels, I clenched and prayed. But no divine intervention was forthcoming. No, I was in labor and the baby was cresting now. I looked up at my father with helpless, pleading eyes. He nodded, then simply carved a trench in the ground with the heel of his boot and pointed. Here? Outside?! I was incredulous, but the call of the wild was unrelenting. By the time Mom returned with a paper towel roll, all evidence of the deed had been buried, including her husband's ubiquitous handkerchief. A most valiant (if ignoble) ending for a piece of cloth we'd often teased him for carrying. Never again would I question his custom.
For decades afterward, Dad would jokingly exhort us to keep an eye peeled for the reappearance of a lone spectral handkerchief as we scoured the grounds for our tree.
* * * * * *
On every tree-hunting expedition, when we'd finally somehow reach an accord, our father would initiate the cutting process with great pomp, squatting to eyeball and gauge how much of the base we had to include in order to guarantee the trunk would fit in the stand. If it met with his approval, he'd pierce the bark and begin sawing with his own hand tool brought from our garage, the reigning Guinness-record holder for World's Dullest Blade2. Once he'd started cutting, we'd each kneel to take a turn, ducking beneath the lowest branches to inhale the scent of Christmas — fresh sawdust, sap, evergreen needles — and work the saw until lactic acid filled our arm. Then we'd roll away and allow someone else to step in. There were times when Mom missed her spot in the rotation because she was too busy examining the majesty of nature around us. The louder we'd call for her to come take her turn, the further away she'd wander. Coincidence, not causation, I'm sure.
Once the blade had nearly severed the trunk, the on-duty lumberjack would summon assistance and others would rush to support the branches from on high. When the tree began to tip and gravity took over, a thunderous shout of "Tim-her!" announced to the county that the Fays had successfully secured their yearly prize. All that was left was for one of us to stand atop the newly formed stump and recite a short, ironic soliloquy from Dr. Seuss's anti-deforestation manifesto, The Lorax.
There was the year we pulled into the farm's dirt and gravel parking lot and just sat there, awestruck. Not ten feet in front of us was the perfect tree. None of us dared breathe, for fear of this rarest of occurrences evaporating like the morning mist. Our parents insisted we survey the entire property to see if anything else caught our eye, but nothing better than perfection was to be had. Miraculously, the flawless specimen was still standing and unclaimed when we returned. I shudder to think of our reactions had it not been.
On an annual basis and from the time we were little more than toddlers, my siblings and I reveled in the discovery of ‘Ice Cities,’ a fascinating natural occurrence where frost created tiny pillars between topsoil and the next layer of clay. We'd make surgical incisions in the earth with our mittens, attempting to pry the solid top layer loose and flip it over, exposing miniature icy skyscrapers and crystallized geodesic temples below.
Though we found ourselves in subzero climates countless other times as we grew, nowhere else did we ever witness this ecological phenomenon. The exploration of Ice Cities was a wintertime revelation confined to the frozen tundra of North Plains alone.
For a decade or so, our family vehicle was a Plymouth Reliant, a six-seater station wagon featuring a new-car smell that never dissipated and likewise never failed to make me carsick. We were for several years tasked with acquiring a tree for our paternal grandmother as well. This meant we'd leave the farm not only with one tree tied to the roof, we also had to fold down the back seat and stuff a second one inside the vehicle itself for the return trip. Invariably, we kids fought over the privilege of riding unseatbelted in back with the tree, pressed up against the windows like suction-cupped plush toys, giggling hysterically the entire time as the intoxicating aroma of freshly-cut evergreen filled our nostrils.
There was the year the tree on top kept falling off. This was a supernatural aberration, as our father was an experienced sailor who could tie reliable knots in his sleep. The only rational explanation was that the quality of the rope itself was subpar. Or perhaps that was the year he began letting me 'help' with the tying process?
Upon arriving back home, our beloved new tree would be unceremoniously cast onto the front lawn for the night. Dad insisted on this, “So the spiders have time to crawl off before we bring it inside.” The rest of us all silently believed this part of the ritual to be utter nonsense, providing local arachnids just as much opportunity to crawl on and hitch a ride indoors for the holidays, but nobody was willing to openly contradict our genius engineer father. The dozen tiny spiders who'd annually migrate across our living room ceiling over the next week did that well enough through their mere defiant presence.
* * * * * *
There was the year both my father and brother got walloped by some mutant strain of the Siberian Death Flu, leaving them bedridden3 and unable to attend our much-anticipated tree harvest. This battlefield emergency resulted in my sister recruiting her best friend (and neighbor) to attend, marking the first time any non-blood relative had infiltrated our grand Tradition. Happily, by no means would it be the last.
The circumstances also promoted me to a position of great authority, and I'm ashamed to admit I temporarily became a bit of a tyrant. After silently watching my mother, sister, and neighbor argue over possible selections for the better part of an hour, I made the executive decision to drop the bomb, quietly approaching a likely fir and proceeding to saw.
“What are you doing? !” they shouted in a horrified concert of protest.
“Are you going to cut the tree down?” I replied, blinking innocently, already knowing the answer. “Are you going to carry it up the hill to the parking lot? Do you know how to tie knots to lash it down?”
Abashed silence met my pointed inquiries.
“No? Then I've got the tiebreaking vote, don’t I?” Concealing what must have been a truly Luciferian grin, I turned back to my task.
That year I fear we returned to the sick ward with not just a tree, but a good deal of lingering hurt feelings as well. However, the introduction of my sister's best friend to the mix added a grand new element to our Tradition. In years to come, the Fays would be joined by all manner of friends, significant others, and offspring/pets on our annual arboreal quest. And so the Tradition began to sprawl to other cities, states, and countries as we grew and left home, making connections with others who'd become our chosen extended families, yet always returning to Portland and thence to North Plains. We shared the joy of the caroling; the contentiousness of the selection; the communal sweat equity of the cutting/tying down/transporting process; even the Traditional, nonsensical overnight spider-proofing that — regardless of geographical location or climate — still never seemed to actually work.
* * * * * *
Perhaps one of my favorite moments of expanding and amplifying our Tradition occurred when pets, who'd never before witnessed a live Christmas tree in their living room, were initially confronted by this baffling paradox. Regardless of feline or canine heritage, their responses were nearly identical: eyes wide, fur standing on end, nerves fraying and palpable to all.
“There's a tree ... in the house!” They'd stare with a mixture of excitement, alarm, bewilderment, and fascination, gaze darting rapidly from menacing evergreen intruder to owners and back, as if their trusted humans had lost their minds by signing off on this absurdity. It was another Christmas Miracle that our beloved furry companions all quickly recognized the sanctity of our festive centerpiece. A few harmless swats at low hanging ornaments, perhaps, but no late-night attacks or attempts to remove it entirely. In fact, some of the most adorable photographs resulted when they grew comfortable enough to nap beneath the branches, as if the tree too had become an accepted member of the family.
I have heard tell of households who claim their Christmas tree over the Thanksgiving weekend. We discovered through trial-and-catastrophic-error that, if we wished our tree to make it past New Year's Day4 without the local fire marshal assaulting our front door with a battering ram, torches and pitchforks not far behind, then harvesting our family's fir or spruce somewhere between December 10th and 15th was the optimal window.
Sometime in early January, the ornaments would go back into the box, the lights would come off, and any remaining tinsel would be removed. Our tree would be lifted gently out of its base and — in a grotesque reenactment of its first night on the property — our cherished holiday mascot would be flung outside (backyard rather than front, this time) to hasten the drying process. A month or so later, one of us would head out back with the big 'clappers' and that same toothless saw to dismember and chunk the residual physical echo of our favorite yearly Tradition. The needled branches would often immediately go into the woodpile in the garage, while sections of trunk remained stacked outside for the better part of a year to weather against the moss-covered retaining wall in our backyard.
At some point, they'd be conveyed back indoors, eventually making their way into our fireplace, where they were given the seat of highest honor, usually around Thanksgiving. There they'd be reunited with their disembodied branches in a crowning, culminating blaze of glory, the fragrance again swimming together as needles crackled, sap dripping and popping; one spectacular final hurrah as our precious tree bade farewell with a flourish, transformed into a blend of smoke, flame, ash, and — perhaps most generously — warmth, wrapping once more around the family who'd chosen it above all others. Each.
1 The title of the tune refers to three of Santa's elves, memorialized in an early holiday-themed, animated TV special. Apparently, the popularity of the broadcast earned the theme song a great deal of airplay on New England radio stations during Decembers in the 1950s and early '60s. Happy hunting on the Internet!
2 Each year some member of the family who owned the farm would step out of the smoky shack to suggest their loan of a more efficient implement free-of-charge and we dared hope for half a second. But Dad unfailingly waved away their razor-sharp offering. It wouldn't have been Tradition.
3 My mother will be only too happy to back me up on this. Their symptoms were so extreme that she not only quarantined them in different wings of the house but also issued each a little bell to summon assistance (due to claims that their throats were so raw and sore they were unable to croak for help). Further evidence of the serious nature of their illnesses can be found in the fact that neither abused this amenity, likely because both were honestly too weakened to muster the strength required to lift and ring it.
4 And this we fervently did. We all loved Christmas, but through white-knuckled discipline instilled over decades, we trained ourselves to wait. Knowing our Christmas tree would still be green and vertical through early January meant we were able to maintain the yuletide season just a bit longer. Seeing dried out Christmas trees on the curb with the trash on December 26th is still one of the most melancholic sights for me, nearly as depressing as plastic trees replacing the real thing. I know ... #FirstWorldProblems. | RF