As a child, I didn’t ever go hungry. I didn’t ever go to school in old, torn clothes. I had a pair of new shoes every school year, and I vividly remember shoe shopping in the old Geneva Sports store in Lake Geneva, the one that was next to the Prange Way. Neither store exists here today, which is sad in a survival of the fittest sort of way. I had everything a kid could want and then some. At Christmas time, we had presents. Lots and lots of presents. There were stockings for each of us boys, stuffed with random presents and apples and at least one orange. Not those ugly juice oranges either, but those great big glossy oranges, the ones with the extra thick dimpled shell. This was the same every year, and I’m grateful that there never was a year where we didn’t have a proper Christmas morning.
Yes, Christmas morning was always right, always pure in a materialistic sort of way, but several years it almost didn’t happen. I suppose Christmas can happen without a Christmas tree, but that is true in the way that you can make ice cream without eggs but who does? And if someone does, then why? And if they do, and we understand that, it still doesn’t make it right. The Christmas trees of my youth were always real trees. My parents didn’t succumb to the cleanliness of a fake tree until long after my bothers and I were grown. The trees were always real, never particularly impressive, and some years they were barely there at all. I remember many years, which may be one year or it may be six years, through this dim of time I cannot remember exactly, but these years found us on Christmas Eve, or the Eve of that day, where there were presents in a heap around the area where the tree would historically go.
The tree was not there yet for only one reason. We weren’t crunched for time, as my father was a school teacher and as far as I can tell the primary driving force for becoming a school teacher is to have Christmas break, or Winter Break as it may be known now. We weren’t necessarily crunched for cash, though I suppose that was a possibility. No, we didn’t have any acceptable reason for not having the tree sooner, aside from the fact that Christmas trees go on sale a day or two before Christmas and my father would intently wait for that to be the case before he tugged and pulled to get his wallet out of his back pocket. Christmas trees were expensive, and if only we could hold off until one of these late dates we could beat the tree vendor and pay just $20 for what would have otherwise been a $30 tree. Victory would be ours, but we would have to suffer the casualty of a Christmas that almost never was.
With that in mind, I took to the woods last Friday, that day after Christmas when people shoot and stab each other for the rights to a discounted television. I was at Countryside Trees, on North Walworth Road, approximately three miles due West from Pearce’s Corn Stand. As my home is on that road, the drive was short. The air was crisp without being particularly cold, the thin blanket of still-white snow lending a Christmasy feel to an otherwise fallish day. The parking lot was full with tree toting revelers, the saws sharp enough, the tree selection enormous. There were pre-cut trees, stacked nicely in a row, with netting on them and price tags dangling from the tidy mesh. This would be too easy, to select a tree and strap it to the car and drive home to display it in the corner of this new room. So we grabbed a saw and we surveyed the land and we set out, bearing west with a slight southerly lean.
All of the trees at this farm are nice enough, but we wanted one that was better, taller, thicker, without being too thick. With this in mind, we walked past tree after tree, short ones and taller ones, all green with needles short and needles long. Something strange happens when searching for the perfect tree- all of the trees begin to look the same. They are all green, all alive, all fine in their own way. We set out intent on sorting through the trees to find the one that looked the most ideal, but after some hiking we decided that it didn’t really matter, so I cozied up to the snowy grass and I sawed at the trunk of the tree that we figured would be good enough. It was a tall tree, one of the taller ones, as far as we could tell. The sawing was not difficult, and with a Timber! the tree fell to the ground.
It looked so regal while standing tall, and when it fell it suddenly looked small, uneven, not perfect. We carried it back to the processing center, where they shook the tree with a tree shaker, and then pulled it through some fine plastic mesh that bent the branches upward, like we were making a coniferous sausage. The price for this tree was seventy-three dollars, which isn’t cheap for a tree until you consider that tree had been growing for seven or eight or maybe nine years before I ceremoniously hacked off its trunk. The tree cut, bound, and paid for, was now readied for its journey from processing center to the top of my wife’s car. Thankfully, Countryside Trees had a special transport in mind.
Newfoundland dogs are apparently good at towing things, so the tree farm teamed up with the Upper Midwest Newfoundland Club and select dogs are available on the weekends to drag trees from the woods to your car. It’s a neat thing, especially if you have a seven year old daughter. So we did what any dog loving family would do, and we made a sturdy dog pull our fresh-cut tree to our car. Sadly, the dog was of little help when we needed to lift the tree to the top of the car, but we managed anyway.
You could buy a tree this week at some roadside tree stand. You could buy one at Home Depot. Or, you could load the family into the car and in the finest Clark Griswold fashion you could drive to the lake, and drive down North Walworth Road. Waive at my house, in the event that I’m watching for you, and go chop down a tree of your own. Then make the dogs drag it to your car, and drive it home. Don’t wait until Christmas Eve, either, because I don’t think these trees go on sale regardless of the date.