Christmas Tree Adventures

By Tom Poland

Three Novembers ago my sisters and I were going through Mom’s things, and that meant a trip into the attic. There, Christmases past surrounded me, like that old Dickens’s Christmas Carol. There I was amid ghosts of sorts: ornaments, wreathes, and red velvet boughs hung from the rafters with care … and an artificial tree.

I don’t know why my parents gave up real trees. Dad probably felt it would save money. Less trouble too I suppose. The era of plastic trees with lights built into them arrived. The various artificial trees were perfectly shaped and beautiful but I missed an Eastern red cedar cut from Granddad’s farm. That’s where we got a tree in the old days. One whiff of its needles and I knew Christmas was at hand.

As a boy there was no better day than a frigid tree-hunting day on the farm beneath a gray quilted sky hinting of snow. (When I was a kid all winter skies hinted of snow. But it never snowed Christmas day. Never.) Sometimes we jumped a covey of quail or a rabbit and now and then a hawk would cross over. We were in the midst of nature, not traffic or fluorescent lights. And no crowds. None whatsoever.

Those farm cedars had a “hole” due to how they grew. Like a stunning woman with a facial scar, it made them more beautiful in a real way. Mom and Dad would turn the hole to the wall and string bubble cane lights and icicles onto the fresh green boughs, and I’d watch as the lights bubbled, reflecting on the icicles. No lights can ever top those. Now Christmas lights are LEDs. Artificial trees don’t smell like Christmas and you get them at Walmart or a street corner beneath a string of naked light bulbs. What fun.

When Christmas was over we hauled the tree into the woods where nature took its course. Now people in the cities hold “grinding of the greens” or you chop them into short lengths and the garbage guys haul it off. What a sad demise for a Christmas tree.

This Thanksgiving I spent four days at my daughter, Beth’s place, up in Apex, North Carolina. The day after Thanksgiving we headed out to find a Christmas tree. That meant a trip to a “farm” overrun with people. So many people in fact that traffic needed a policeman to manage things. But there was no policeman. No problem, my son-in-law, Chris, found a way to get us into the farm. We parked, got out, and found ourselves in the midst of a crowd.

The trees, shipped in from the North Carolina Mountains, were leaning here and there. Trees were everywhere. We were in a relocated forest. Families appraised them and when the right tree was found a fellow on a Polaris ATV hauled it to a shed where it would be shaken free of loose needles, cut and squared at its base, then wrapped in netting for the trip home. Cheap they were not. Granddad’s cedars? Free. A true Christmas gift.

Beth and her family got the tree home and put it up and without doubt it’s beautiful. What bothers me though is the fact that her children have no memories of exploring a real farm, looking for the right tree. I, however, do. The entire time we were getting the tree my mind was back in Lincoln County, Georgia, more precisely at Granddad Poland’s farm. Come Christmas in the 1950s, we’d head down Double Branches Road to the farm. There, we got in the back of a battered pick-up and headed through the pastures to the edges of fields where red cedars stood like sentries, like soldiers moved to the front of Shakespeare’s Birnam Woods. We’d look and look and eventually find the right tree. Dad would cut it, and those needles and gold drops of resin filled the chill air with the original fragrance of Christmas. I sure miss those days.

The other night a woman asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I thought a bit. “Nothing. I have all I need or want.” Then I thought and an answer came to me. “The gift I want? A return to Christmas trees cut from woods.”

Those few of you with real trees and vintage lights like my parents once used, you old timers you? Thank you. Without doubt you will have a Merry Christmas, a traditional Christmas, one filled with the fragrance of a forest. Not polyvinyl chloride.

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
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Tom Poland is the author of twelve books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press released his book, Georgialina, A Southland As We Knew It, in November 2015 and his and Robert Clark’s Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II in 2014. The History Press of Charleston published Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia in 2014. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, “Georgialina.”