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From Where I Lie: Memories of Christmas Trees Past

Tuesday December 23, 2008

By Larry Johnson

    Once again it’s the Christmas Season, also referred to by some as the Prozac Season. It is the beginning of deep winter and, at this point, most people can be divided into three distinct camps. The first group spend hours thumbing through catalogs and sales flyers looking for the perfect Christmas gift for their loved ones. The second group of people spend most of their time thumbing through the summer months of their calendars, peering wistfully at the photographs of flowers, trees and babbling brooks. The third group is the “bring it on” group, and these folks tend to take the season head-on. They don their ski boots and Gore-Tex and make a frontal attack on winter, believing, with some justification perhaps, that total immersion is the best way to deal with the wilder elements of nature.

     When I think of winter I inevitably think of Christmas, and when I think of Christmas I inevitably think of two very memorable ones. The first one that stands out in my mind occurred in 1950, and it was “The season to be jolly” following a major hurricane that any Vermonter, alive at that time, will still remember. It nearly blew the state off the map, and along with our barn roof, it blew down much of Snake Mountain. I was eight years old at the time and it had been my experience, during my short life span, that our family always hiked to Cranberry Bog, near the top of the mountain, to collect our “perfect” Christmas tree. My mother was determined that that Christmas would be no different.

     Normally the entire trip would take two hours from our farm to the bog; another hour to find and cut the tree and two hours more for the return trip. The whole expedition usually took five hours at most. That year, however, was to be very different. The hurricane had knocked down trees willy nilly and the usual hike soon turned into an endurance struggle. We climbed over and crawled under one fallen tree after another. I was the short- legged one of the group, so I did more crawling than climbing, and this put me at ground-level with about two feet of snow and nearly impenetrable branches. My feet and fingers froze but I was determined not to whine about it, and my indomitable mother was determined that we would make the traditional trek, come hell or high water. It took us nearly twice as long to climb the mountain and by then we had lost most of our enthusiasm. Through some miracle, Dad managed to get a fire started and we began to thaw out a bit. It was at this point that we should have started down the mountain immediately, but a sense of pride, I imagine, kept any of us from suggesting this cowardly act without first procuring the “perfect” tree.

     The bar was soon lowered for the perfect tree and, with daylight waning, we started for home, dragging the tree behind us. We were none-too-gentle with our prize and, by the time we got home, several hours later than our original estimated time of arrival, we were thoroughly frozen and exhausted and the lovely spruce we’d started out with was missing most of its needles.

     Some twenty-five years later, I was married, living in Poultney with a very Christmas-spirited wife who insisted on nothing less than the “perfect” tree for our living room.   This time, however, we would not visit Cranberry Bog. Instead, for about three weeks preceding Christmas, we spent nearly every waking hour after work searching the gas stations and church yards for the perfect tree. It was my job to hold up and twirl every spruce in Rutland County for my wife’s inspection. Who says we don’t marry women like our mothers? It was obvious, after several exhausting weeks, that nothing short of a spruce descending from heaven was going to meet Elaine’s impossible standards. As luck or misfortune would have it, depending on your perspective, my view of Christmas trees was about to be changed forever. Not long before, we had adopted a full-grown St. Bernard dog from the local humane society, and Mandy, as she was called, had not adjusted as well as hoped for to her new home. One night as we returned from our Christmas tree search, we discovered that Mandy had eaten our sofa. There were pieces of stuffing and naugahyde from one end of the house to the other. It was my wife’s belief that Mandy had been left alone too much and that from now on one of us would have to stay home with her while the other went tree shopping. I was elected to do the shopping. I couldn’t believe my good luck.

     As anyone who has ever pursued the gas- station Christmas tree knows, the closer you get to the big day, the fewer trees there are to choose from. It was obvious to me, as I drove from one tree vendor to the next, that Elaine and I had waited just a little too long to get our tree. I knew I had to get one that night or there wouldn’t be any Yuletide joy at our house that year. The last gas station was about to close as I pulled in. There it was. The saddest looking Christmas tree I had ever seen, all by itself. It brought back memories of the hurricane tree of twenty-five years past. “Go ahead, take it,” the attendant told me. “It needs a good home.”       

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