Brown County Christmas Tree
~ by Jeff Tryon
In the darkest week of the year, during our shortest days, we raise a dazzling array of lights, ornaments, decorations, and Christmas trees of every fancy— a sea of lights dancing, blinking, singing against the darkness of winter solstice.
They say the tradition of hacking down a live tree, dragging it into the house, and lighting it up to celebrate the yuletide season is four or five hundred years old. The tradition has changed a lot, especially in my lifetime.
When I was a kid, the ordeal would begin with a trip up onto the hill behind Aunt Ruth’ s, where we would make our way through a field of small Scotch Pines— all about the right height, five to eight feet tall. Dad would select a candidate and whack it down with an axe. Later, when we were bigger, he would make my brother and I cut it down with a rusty, loose-bladed bow saw.
It never occurred to me at the time that the reason the trees there were uniformly of Christmas tree height was because Dad and Uncle Eddie had planted them ten or fifteen years earlier. They planted a lot of pine trees for erosion control in Brown County in the 1940s and 50s. I have ventured into the woods recently to find a“ real, wild, old-fashioned tree,” only to find them all grown to an ungainly size.
Dad would never have dreamed of going to a tree lot and certainly would not have paid actual money for a Christmas tree— a thing that grew wild and could be had anywhere for the labor of removing it.
Of course, these old wild trees were not shaped and groomed like the Christmas lot trees we’ re used to these days. Often you find today’ s trees get a good spray of green dye to make them look a little more lively. The wild trees looked like residents of remote
places, kind of shaggy and bewildered, compared to the nicely turned out commercial trees of today.
Dad would hammer two small boards together in a criss-cross and then hammer the resulting cross up into the trunk of the tree. This process was accompanied by much excited dialogue, occasional injury, and was rarely effective on the first attempt.
Most of my adult life, I have labored with those metal tree stands— a kind of dish with feet or legs and little spikes you’ re supposed to drive up into the tree trunk. These are, if possible, even more ineffective than the boards.
But, recently they’ ve come up with a better mousetrap, a plastic bucket on a big flat disk, virtually impossible to knock over, and a
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56 Our Brown County • Nov./ Dec. 2015