It’s out there somewhere, waiting.
It might be a lone, scraggly cedar struggling in the shadows of a hardwood swamp, or a loblolly bent and twisted from a storm, condemned to be cast aside when its hundreds of relatives are harvested. It could even be a longleaf pine, scraped down one side by a tree felled by a storm, golden resin filling its wound and drying white as the tree tries to heal. There’s even the chance that it’s a Fraser fir that grew up in the mountains of our state, survived insects and Hurricane Helene, was harvested and brought this way, but will be left behind on Christmas Eve, since for whatever reason it wasn’t good enough for the tree-shoppers seeking the “perfect” tree for every room of their house.
We’re always considered late putting up Christmas trees in our family, since we always seek a natural one, and we try to keep ours up through Old (Orthodox) Christmas, or at least New Year’s Day. It’s a family tradition that has stayed with us for longer than anyone can remember, and it stretches back multiple generations, of course, back to a time before flame-retardant chemicals and special fertilizers and farmers grooming their trees for that magazine-cover look.
I was stomping across frozen fields with my father and brother Mike from the time I could walk, seeking the right Christmas tree every year. When Miss Rhonda and I married, we ended up choosing “Charlie Brown” trees long before it became a fashion statement. Sometimes it was because time had run out, sometimes we didn’t have the extra money to buy a nicer tree, and sometimes it just worked out that way. The ugly, leftover trees were sometimes all we could get, but like a three-legged dog or an old horse, we figured they deserved some love too.
It seems strange how God has always made sure so many of our trees were harvested at exactly the right time. They were rarely “perfect” by textbook standards, but they were to us.
A big beautiful cedar that filled the living room of an old, cold house where we once lived came from a ditchbank literally across the road. We were having one of those Southeastern North Carolina white Christmases (meaning ice and freeing rain) and we had both been too sick to seriously look for a tree. I kind of hated cutting that cedar down and dragging it across the road and through our front door – but the next week, a road crew clearcut every inch of the ditchbank.
There was another time where work and family and other things got in the way, and we finally gave up and went to a Christmas tree lot, but arrived after it had closed. Our tree that year came off a pile of discards tossed over to the side; some were smoldering from the bonfire lit by the attendant who decided to close early.
The top half of one tree became our Christmas centerpiece a few years back. It was bent into two right angles but had mostly recovered when I found it. Oddly enough, the remains of that tree are still growing, or they were when last I walked that path a few months back. Pine sap cures many ills, apparently even beheading, at least in the case of a white pine.
It’s funny how every tree brings up the memories of ones before it, and I don’t mean the wonderful family times or opening presents or even placing our traditional ornaments.
Our last tree in Kelly I found while riding my big palomino June; I marked it and came back later with a more practical way to transport it, since June could have been trusted to have a Christmas card-quality tree tied to her saddle, but I wasn’t experienced enough of a rider to trust myself.
Through the years, Good William IX, Walter the Wonder Dog, my beloved Toni, and any number of other dogs wandered along with me, enjoying the annual trek, smelling the plethora of smells of the woods or the swamp’s edges. Lauren and Gloria accompanied me on the hunt for their first Christmas tree, even though their puppy legs were really too short for such an adventure back then.
Dudley, who preceded all of them, was with me not once but twice when there were real, live snowflakes falling. None lasted until Christmas, of course, but they were close enough for folks to argue about whether or not we had that rarest of all beasts in Southeastern North Carolina, a white Christmas.
I didn’t have a dog with me the year that Brother Mike, the Old Man and myself dodged Uncle Ralph’s ill-tempered bull to find a magnificent fence row cedar that was lacking an almost pie wedge-shaped section. Uncle Ralph solved the problem by chopping down another, smaller cedar; Papa and Miss Lois wired and worried with it until you really couldn’t tell the tree had a hole.
It was sleeting as we crossed that bull’s field, and by the time we got the tree tied onto the car, it was actually snowing. Everyone hoped and prayed for some of the snow to make it another week or two for Christmas, but instead we just got a blizzard a few days later, in time for my birthday.
Whenever I go hunting for our tree this year – and it won’t be for a couple weeks yet – I know I won’t be alone, even if I am by myself.
If it’s cold, Papa will be struggling along beside me in his overcoat, wearing a fedora long since retired to Saturday duty and thoroughly impractical wingtips, a scarf around his neck. He’ll stress over whether Miss Lois will be happy with the tree, because that’s how the Old Man was.
If it’s a warm day, I might in my mind be astride a horse the color of sunshine, exploring a trail on an impromptu ride, as we loved to do before she got sick and died as a hurricane blew ashore.
If the day is the typical beautiful fall-like weather we often have in December, when everything is crisp but the sunshine warm coming down from a cloudless, painfully blue sky, I might see William IX on the trail with his nose down, tail up, seeking a coon, Dudley eying a flight of doves and wondering why I don’t shoot, Walter just enjoying life, and Toni nervously watching to be sure I don’t fall down.
That tree is out there somewhere, having grown from a seed shed from a cone, then survived pests, hungry squirrels, overly dry and overly wet periods, just to grow crooked or bent or stunted or in a place where it will be threatened by tractors or traffic. A few strikes of a big side knife or strokes of a saw, and it will be hauled home to be decorated with lights, ornaments and mementos from several generations of both of our families, as well as friends and folks long forgotten.
While you won’t be able to see them, there in its bent branches will also rest the memories of all the perfect trees that came before.
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