“I will not kill another
living tree for Christmas,” announced a waitress at a restaurant I
frequent. It is a common misconception that cutting a fir at
Christmas is killing a tree that will otherwise live.
“Christmas trees are grown to be cut,” I said sagely. “That is
their reason for being.” Then I recounted the story of a longtime
friend who bought a live, balled tree every year for the last 30
years and lovingly planted each one near her farmhouse. The trees
had grown so large, they shaded her garden and cut off light to her
sun room. Last spring, she cut down five of the aging Christmas
trees, one of them 30 years old. This winter the trunks of those
Christmas trees planted decades ago are yule logs, warming her
farmhouse.
Sooner or later, Christmas trees help us
celebrate Christmas. They bring the outdoors in, and who cares if a
few hundred pine needles litter the floor?
Oregon has
more than 750 licensed Christmas tree growers who cut more than 8
million of the 25-30 million trees cut nationally each year. Almost
half of Oregon’s trees go to California, while more than one
million trees are exported outside the United States — to
Japan, Mexico, Canada and Asia.
Most of the trees we see
as we drive along the highway in the Northwest are Douglas fir, but
they will never grow up to be the “money tree” beloved of the
timber industry. Christmas trees — Douglas fir, Grand fir or
the popular Noble fir — are grown in plantations. There they
are “cultured,” deliberately grown with denser limbs than trees
found in the wild; by trimming the boughs each year, they grow so
you can hang more ornaments on them. They are cut and shipped to
market after three or four years.
There is no more sorry
sight than an abandoned Christmas tree farm. Trees are planted so
densely they begin crowding each other out after five years or so.
Weaker trees die, topped out by stronger trees, and become a fire
hazard.
Don’t worry about the Christmas trees that
you are allowed to cut on public lands. The Forest Service
deliberately steers you to “overstocked stands” where the small
tree you cut and take home would eventually be crowded out by its
bigger brothers and left to die anyway. In exchange for thinning
the public forest for the Forest Service, you get a “natural” tree
that lends that “over the river and through the woods” New England
flavor to your holiday.
The tree is brought back in a
pickup or SUV instead of a sled and is probably cut down by a chain
saw instead of an ax. But no matter. A “natural” tree is an
experience, not just a purchase.
Our traditional view of
Christmas comes from our English roots and our nation’s New
England beginnings. There’s is no place like home for the
holidays like the hearth of a New England farmhouse. A rock
fireplace is required equipment. Town is a country crossroads and
white clapboard churches with their spires reaching heavenward, and
snow-covered red barns where the cattle are lowing. It is only a
slight exaggeration to suggest that Charles Dickens invented
Christmas as we know it when he published “A Christmas Carol in
Prose, being a Ghost Story of Christmas” in 1843. We’re still
reading the story of Tiny Tim, and maybe we always will.
Today, some folks are unpacking fake trees and fluffing up their
artificial limbs. Others are dispensing with the Christmas tree
ritual altogether, either from the mistaken notion they are killing
a tree that would otherwise live, or simply because there
isn’t enough time. Life is just too busy.
Some of
us will always make the time. In my family, ornaments are unearthed
from boxes that date back to childhood. It is a thin but durable
tie to the family in a day when the parents have passed away and
the rest of the clan may be scattered over the country, maybe even
around the world. We need a Christmas tree to make us feel whole.
Russell Sadler is a contributor to Writers on
the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org). He is a writer in Eugene,
Oregon.
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