Loving/Hating the Christmas Tree

The tree you see is my Christmas tree this year. This marks the ninth year of having a book holiday tree. Admittedly, it is the perfect tree for an author, but I started building this tree each year long before I opened my laptop and began writing my first novel.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Christmas trees most of my life. As a child growing up on a rural Wisconsin farm, the family tree was harvested each year from our back 40. We’d pile onto the tractor with Dad driving and my mom and siblings standing around him or sitting on the fenders. We’d bump back to the woods, stomp around in the snow until we got cold enough to agree on a tree, and Dad would cut it down. The frozen fingers and runny nose started me not liking Christmas trees very much.  I don’t remember how we got the tree back to the house (Towed it behind the tractor? Loaded it onto a trailer? Manually carried it?). I do remember shaking it violently before bringing it inside to get rid of loose needles and any hitchhiking wildlife. When it was time to decorate, I wasn’t allowed to handle any ornaments because I was too little, and too clumsy. The fragile glass ornaments didn’t stand a chance in my little hands. I was allowed to put on the tinsel as high as I could reach, with Mom quietly rearranging it behind me.

We moved off the farm when I was 14 to a small house in town. A large tree would have taken up valuable living space, so we “upgraded” to an artificial Christmas tree. It was about four feet tall, and my mother declared it to be perfect. She did have a point – it was symmetrical, wouldn’t drop needles, didn’t need watered, and didn’t harbor wildlife. It was also able to hold the heavier ornaments on its twisted wire branches with plastic needles, even if it couldn’t hold a quarter of the family ornaments and lights we had. That first year, Mom decided that our ornaments looked tired and old, not up to snuff on the new, modern tree. Because there was no longer any danger of getting pine sap on our ornaments, it was time to make new ornaments. We spent the following year making felt, crocheted, beaded, and clay ornaments together. I started loving the idea of a Christmas tree amid all the art and creativity. I still have some of those ornaments in a box in my basement. Sadly, they are now the old and tired ornaments.

During my college years, I sheared trees at a local pine tree farm as my summer job. The first summer on that job was the summer where the hate part of the love/hate relationship took hold. Christmas trees don’t grow naturally into perfect cones. If left to their own devices, they are much shaggier and the branches are spaced far apart. To get the right shape, teenagers and college students walk around each tree, in the sun, with the bugs, swinging long machetes and lopping off the tips of the branches. As the day dragged on, after tree number 500 or so, the grip on that machete would not be so tight. A number of times a machete would fly out of someone’s hand, endangering the toes and jugular veins of the person next to you. I recall a number of close calls, but no actual incidents. The closest I came to blood loss was when I lost the grip on my machete and it lodged in the toe of my sneaker perfectly in the middle of the gap between my big toe and the toe next to it.

In my first apartment, a large space above the Plainfield Five-and-Dime with high ceilings and a huge window facing the highway that passes through town, my boyfriend helped me harvest a tree from the wild edge of a park that was several blocks away. Totally illegal. But there had been a huge snowstorm, and no one was out and about to catch us. We walked there, borrowed a saw, cut it down, and dragged it back through the streets to my apartment. The tree had not had the benefit of being sheared, so it was seven feet of weedlike abandon. The handful of ornaments I had were lost in its branches. My boisterous Siamese cat made a fine tree topper, though.

When I got married and started a family, we got our tree each year from the same tree farm where I had worked during my college summers. My sister and her husband had partnered with the owner of that farm, so we could harvest from the fields that were theirs. The memories of tromping through the snow, fingers going numb and nose running, came rushing back. Now add the whining and arguing of two children and tying the tree to the top of our car for the hour and a half drive home. Idyllic.

We discovered when my son was four that he was allergic to Christmas trees. He’d been ill with dramatic runny noses and breathing issues every December, but we’d assumed it was seasonal flu/colds. The year he was four, he went from being completely fine to miserable before we fully got the tree decorated. It all finally clicked that he had an allergy and not a weak immune system. That tree was evicted to the front porch and we made a scramble to the closest store to buy an artificial tree.

I kept that tree for the next several years, fluffing it into shape each year, shooing the cat out of its branches. One year, I was carrying it downstairs to store it after the holidays and thought I was on the concrete floor when I was really on the bottom step. I ended up on the floor under the tree with two throbbing and rapidly swelling ankles. I was home alone, so I sat there swearing until I felt capable of crawling up the stairs and assessing my injuries. I drove myself to Urgent Care and was relieved to find out nothing was broken. I spent the month of January bandaged and limping with a sprained ankle and a strained ankle (I still don’t know the difference).

Finally, after seeing a picture of a book tree on social media, I decided to give it a try myself. I have an unhealthy number of books, so I had everything I needed. That first year, the tree was short and wide, but I’ve perfected my method over the years. A book tree is cat-proof and hypoallergenic. Perfect. I may love Christmas trees again.