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Now, This Here is a Tree!

1 November 2009 565 views No Comment BY Stacey Muncie

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“This is the Christmas tree emporium of the entire Midwest,” announces the tree lot proprietor in the movie A Christmas Story. Leading the Parker family around his collection of pre-cut trees, he grabs a nearby pine, “Now you ain’t gonna find no better tree, than this here tree. This here tree is built to last. Ain’t no needles fallin’ off this tree” he proclaims as the tree leaves a wreath’s worth of needles on the ground. Discarding that one, he moves on to another, exclaiming, “Now, this here is a tree!”

We never went to one of those tree lots when I was a kid. Instead, Mom, Dad, my sisters, and I would all bundle up and head for the local U-cut Christmas tree farm. These days, Christmas tree farmers attempt to create a magical holiday experience for the family —and they’re pretty good at it. Tree-seekers are often greeted by workers in Santa hats, or maybe even Santa himself, before selecting a shiny saw and hopping on a horse-drawn wagon to the back forty where they choose the perfect tree. Sometimes, workers might even offer to tote the day’s catch back up to the parking area so that the smiling family can stroll, arm in arm, up to the gingerbread cottage where they’ll cozy up to the fireplace while they sip hot chocolate. Meanwhile, their tree is shaken in order to remove all the loose needles. This is done by a machine eerily similar in function to those old-school vibration belts folks once used in an attempt to jiggle away the pounds. By the time they’ve had a cookie or two, and paid for their tannenbaum, the family’s tree has been slipped like an evergreen mummy into netting that will further reduce shedding for the trip home and set-up process.

Of course, when I was a kid, the experience was different. Hot chocolate? Where do you think you are, anyway — home? We weren’t even guaranteed a saw, so we usually brought our own. No, there was no hot chocolate, Santa, or anything else. Just trees. Acres of trees. They were not shaken for us, or wrapped up. We brought our own rope for strapping the tree to the car. Christmas trees back then weren’t as perfectly manicured, in my recollection, as their modern cousins. Maybe that’s why, more often than not, we ended up with trees that were, uh, special. I’m sure that my dad’s threshold for traipsing around the tree farm while we all disagreed on which tree would be best probably had something to do with it, too. A dad only puts up with that sort of thing for so long before he gets mad, or saws down the nearest Charlie Brown specimen, or both. This might be what led to the purchase one year of a tree with two tops. So distinctly forked was it that my mom gave each tine its own big, gaudy ‘70’s style topper, because believe it or not, it would have actually looked sillier with just one.

1109tree2 It’s also hard to judge size on Christmas trees in their natural habitat. They have to be pretty doggone big to actually look like they’re big when the only thing you have for reference is a bunch of other Christmas trees. I believe it is this phenomenon that led to our family’s most infamous choice: The Christmas Bush. How we ever thought this tree was normal, I’ll never know. It was, literally, wider than it was tall, and in fact I have a picture of myself standing in front of this tree, and we’re the same height. The picture was taken in 1980, and I’m in the fourth grade, which would make this tree about 4½ feet tall. In my fourth grader’s mind, I’m sure that The Christmas Bush was ideal because having such a large circumference allowed more room underneath for presents. But considering that The Christmas Bush only came about halfway up our front window, I’m sure that like Mr. Parker’s infamous leg lamp, it looked less than ideal from the street.

Tree acquisition was only the beginning. Once home, the tree was placed in its stand before being brought into the house to be decorated, beginning with the lights. Sure, nowadays we have new-fangled LED lights, rope lights, net lights and icicle lights, but back then lights came in only one flavor — Burn Your House Down Hot, which is also known as, “Hey Kid, come here and grab this colorful orb of pain.” These were only slightly less of a fire hazard than the candles used back before homes had electricity. Add these to the flammable sleepers we kids wore back then, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. I can’t say that I really miss those lights, at least not from a health hazard standpoint, but they were big and colorful, and modern mini-lights just don’t pack the same visual punch. But, they also won’t leave you homeless on Christmas Day, either.

Unlike the modern tree, which has had all of the dead needles shaken out of it before leaving the farm, the trees of my youth shed like dandelions. However, instead of being full of light and fluffy seed fuzz, the Christmas tree was full of sharp, pointy little lances. Nobody was blowing on these things and making a wish, unless it was to wish that someone else were doing the clean-up. These dry, brown needles persistently wove themselves into the sculptured avocado of our carpet, and slipped into the crack between it and the baseboard in maddening quantities. We could vacuum them, but not for long before they incapacitated the vacuum cleaner with their clumping, weaving ways. The remainder had to be removed by hand, a task which usually fell to us kids. We were anxious to get on to the fun stuff, but the truth was if we didn’t purposefully pick them up now we’d be finding them accidentally via a pedalian puncture wound later. So, pick we did.

Once the harvest was complete, we could move on to decorating. Some of our ornaments were store-bought, but many were handmade, including the salt dough ornaments my mom had sculpted into colorful Christmas characters. There were also ornaments that we girls had received as gifts from friends and family through the years. These days, a lot of folks do themed trees. Ranging from Victorian frills to NASCAR chic, these trees are dressed to the nines with specific color schemes and matching ornaments. I confess that our home contains two such specimens at Christmastime, the small, artificial, musically themed tree that sits on top of the piano, and our main tree which displays my husband’s collection of toy tractors and other farm related baubles. We have yet another tree that displays favorite childhood ornaments, along with those that we’ve picked up while traveling, including my personal favorite, Okra Claus. There’s something comforting about a hodgepodge of tangible memories that a designer tree just can’t provide.

1109tree3 Probably due to the influence of Little House on the Prairie, we would sometimes string cranberries and popcorn to use as garland. This is an activity that sounds, old-timey and fun until you actually attempt it. First, there is the popcorn, which is plain. No butter, and no salt, making it virtually inedible according to my childhood standards. Then there are the cranberries which are fresh, and sour, and virtually inedible according to just about everyone’s standards. Of course, there’s no garland crafting without the needle and thread. At first, all is well. Still riding the blue spruce high of the tree hunt, I’d settle in with my popcorn and cranberries, imagining the miles of garland that would be adorning our tree. My mind drifted, and soon I was Laura, all clad in calico and old-fashioned sugar plum Christmas happiness.

After about an hour of continuous stringing, during which I stabbed myself with the needle approximately 47 times, I was sure I’d completed enough garland to start hanging it on the tree. Instead, I unfurled my creation only to find that I had approximately three feet of garland. So, I’d press on, stringing, and stabbing, wishing the popcorn was buttered, and sitting cross-legged on the couch until my leg was asleep. After two hours, I was still stringing, while muttering curses alternately against Laura Ingalls Wilder and Orville Redenbacher, as the 326th popcorn kernel broke and I speared my finger flesh yet again. This is probably why in most of the photographs of those childhood trees there are only a couple of yard-long sections of garland, positioned evenly across the tree’s girth. Nearly as tedious, but with less potential for bodily harm, is the construction paper chain. Again, it seems like a good idea when you first start out, but the reality is that it’ll take until February to make enough chain to adequately decorate your tree.

Now that I have my own family, we’ve continued the tradition of having a real Christmas tree. We get our tree from one of those Christmas tree farms with the hot chocolate and the horse-drawn wagon, and the tree shaker. We don’t even have to take our own saw.

But the perfectly conical trees of today don’t quite have the same character as those trees from the past. Who can even tell them apart in pictures these days? Perhaps it’s my memories of those old trees that spawned my attraction to the less-than-perfect pines at the Christmas tree farm. While the majority of trees are virtual clones, there are also a few that aren’t quite perfect. They have big bare spots, or two tops or whatever. Some folks would never choose trees such as these, but perhaps like our family, they should give those imperfect pines a chance. Because by the time it’s all decked out with ornaments, tinsel, a topper or two, and maybe a yard-long section of popcorn garland, even the ugliest of trees will look good enough to make you say, “Now, this here is a tree!”