IN DEFENSE OF CHRISTMAS TREES
One of our family’s traditions is to cut our own Christmas tree. Each December we drive 90 minutes, tracing the Poudre River as it winds and thins, and leads us to a section of the Roosevelt National Forest open to tree cutting. The pines that survive fire and beetle are hearty but homely. Their boughs are an asymmetrical far cry from the carbon copies hawked at tree lots. The price of a patchy Charlie Brown tree, paid with some sweat and endurance, is one we gladly pay.
Each year my anticipation grows for this trek. I’m sure partly due to pride. I’ll go out of my way to tell others about our family pilgrimage. True to a hunter’s form, the tale ends with not only a successful harvest, but the inference of prowess. That’s right, we go up to 10,000 feet elevation. Yeah, sometimes we bring snowshoes because the snow’s so deep. Before the story’s finished, I begin carving another notch on the old credibility belt.
Artificial confidence boost aside, I’ve realized the trip matters partly because of the location. Our tree comes not from some impersonal and distant forest, but from the canyon known to our family throughout the year. That’s where we hike, fish, camp, and picnic. In these outings, the canyon bids us hunt: for color splashed trout, wildflowers, and the river’s song somehow known and new. Far from anomaly, the tree hunt is simply our next pursuit in a landscape grinning with invitation.
As we left, my daughter offered the obligatory teenage pushback against the required uphill hike. But as we wound through the forest, her step quickened. and her head swung looking for the one. Our eyes combed windfalls and beetle kill, pausing to look for what could be. Believing possibility to be a better ally than certainty.
“Ohhh, I love it,” my daughter blurted with a gush of approval. She circled a nondescript 12-foot pine, looking for faults that could not be found. We all agreed.
That evening we snugged the tree into the corner of our living room. The limbs were equally weighted with decoration and memory: glitter dense ornaments from our children’s preschool days, and even a few relics from my wife and I’s childhood. Ornaments that celebrate birth and new life, held by needles slowly brittling. The physical joining of loss and life on boughs that, like our lives, wither and sing.
This tradition requires our participation. Whether dragging a sap-leaky, soft bristled pine from the high country, or assembling the boxed artificial tree from the basement, our effort is needed. We wrestle the tangle of lights. We gently place each ornament. All to create space important enough to centerpiece our homes.
This pursuit and decoration and participation is enough for me to say, Sorry Clark, your Griswold sentimentality of Christmas trees is too flimsy. We labor for this tree so that awe might have room. So that our tendency to downplay good things would be countered by a barrage of ribboned generosity. And so that lights and ornaments and beauty might window us towards grace waiting.
Jesse French
Restoration Project Executive Director
