Christmas Tree 2010

The tree has been sitting naked in the living room for a week. Every morning I comb through its branches with my arms to relax it, unfurl it. It's beautiful. It smells divine. I wonder if it really needs ornamentation. The cats love it. Fifi, la plus belle chatte de la maison, lurks under it, I'm sure feeling like she is outside.

We missed getting a live tree last year, and I wasn't sure we would do it this time, but we did. This year, a trip to our favorite tree vendor, who sends us a discount coupon every year, was fruitful. We were greeted in the lot by a guy who was clearly a casual hire, probably from the Salvation Army, toothless, but full of energy and more customer service-oriented than anyone in Bangalore.

"What are you looking for?"

"A six-foot Noble." (Like Song Il-Guk as Jumong, Muhyul or Yum Moon.)

"Follow me. ... here's one," he said, stripping off the plastic net, propping up the heavy tree for our consideration.

"Beautiful, we'll take it."

The Wizard went off with the coupon to pay for it, leaving me with the casual hire to bounce it free of needles (with a curious vibrator that shook all the loose shit out...I wanted to sit on it, that six-foot Noble) and package it up to take to the roof of our car. He looked at me, "Are you sure this is the one?"

This very hard-working guy then told me he just had a woman come in who made him take 18

(eighteen) trees out of the Matson** container, unwrap them, display them...and she didn't like any of them. And then she left.

"We like this one, it's just fine. I hope this makes up for that," I

said. He took it to the car, the Wizard tipped him well (fresh trees are really heavy) and now we have a truly lovely tree, still waiting for decor, but perfect.

All of which made me recall tree selections of the past:

---going to a "lot" at night near my grandmother's house, strung with lights (kinda like a used car lot) with my father, who in my memory resembles Gregory Peck in "To Kill A Mockingbird," (at right) when I was as tall as maybe his mid-thigh, stomping around in the snow. The tree had to be short enough to fit on the "platform" (wrapped in brick-printed crepe paper) for the American Flyer train and village under it (wish I still had that).

---finding a little tree on December 23, just after our Solstice wedding, also from a snowy lot, decorated with tacky glass ball ornaments from Woolworth's that I still use, (they are on their way to becoming antiques) and a paper-cut snowflake made by my aesthetics professor who said at our wedding that I looked like a snowflake; the tree sat on top of a blond '50s era B&W TV-set, a hand-me-down from the in-laws.

---cutting our own tree on a snowy Pennsylvania hillside, celebrating with champagne many things, particularly 100K miles on the Honda station wagon, a recent birthday, an upcoming anniversary, and the fact that we didn't get caught because we cut down someone else's tree, marked with a tag earlier in the season. My perpetual apologies, we never saw the tag until the tree was felled.

--driving around in the Idaho wilderness with a permit to cut anything we could find. Mulled wine and friendship and a poorly wildly shaped but very fresh tree made that holiday memorable.

--waiting for an hour or so with a few other desperate last minute folks like us, for a tree to be trucked in from Makaha: "They didn't sell well out there."

The Christmas tree is indeed a sacrificial thing. I get very upset with indiscriminate tree slaughter. I have ambivalent feelings about the Christmas tree industry. But at the same time, I remember all those trees of the past, their aroma, the bedecked glory, and...now it's time to put on the lights.

**I am not an employee of Matson, but I love the company's logotype. I don't know if it is intentional, but the "T" looks like an anchor. Perfect for a marine shipping company.

Sacrificing a Ritual

A concatenation of circumstances has led to the third time in my life I have not had the pleasure of a real Christmas tree with which to mark the season.  And a long one...I usually get my money's worth out of the tree...it has been known to last far beyond the 12 Days of Christmas (12/25 to 1/6), sometimes through to Chinese New Year,  Valentine's Day or Ash Wednesday.  (It's always been gone by Easter; that would be doubling up on sacrifices.)

The shipments of Oregon produce to Hawaii this year were smaller than normal...and some of the containers (they come on container ships) were rejected because they were infested with bugs and slugs, illegal aliens wisely not admissible through Hawaii's agricultural inspection.  I personally would have accepted the vermin (having come to accept the local ubiquitous cockroaches, cane spiders and lizards), but the State is cautious about such things.  Our usual vendor did arrange a last minute shipment of trees, flying in 600, for a line of folks who started queueing at 3 a.m., like fans trying to score rare concert tickets.  The Wizard called me after visiting this vendor to say, "They just announced there are 30 trees left and there are 200 people still in line ahead of me."

"Come home now," I said, "that's potential riot."  It wasn't, Hawaii people being generally patient and orderly, and I am satisfied to know there are some children who have a tree that we didn't buy out from under them.  I do wonder if there were tree scalpers.  I hope not.

The alternative is an artificial tree. My first qigong instructor said that plastic plants fulfill the same feng shui function as real ones, although that may just be disinformation spread by the Hong Kong silk and plastic flower industry.  But a fake, more like furniture or a decoy, doesn't have the sacrificial quality that a real tree does, and I don't want to pay money for another thing to store...it's bad enough to store all the ornaments.

The other alternative is a locally grown Norfolk/Cook pine, above, a tropical evergreen that is lovely to look at, and available as a Christmas tree, but lacks the density of the traditional Northern Hemisphere firs, spruces, pines. (I once had one as a potted houseplant in Appalachia; I would decorate it, but it was second string to the spruce we usually cut ourselves.)  The Christmas tree tradition is after all a Northern European, old religion sort of thing. I expected a big rash of illegal Norfolk pine rustling,  and I may actually scavenge some ironwood branches, below, which have a kind of oriental pine look about them, to do at least some greenery decor.

So no tree. We will donate the money we would have spent to our local homeless charity.  And in a sour grapes spirit, I don't have the CHORE of acquiring, decorating, and undecorating, to say nothing of time-consuming visits to the storage locker.  In the meantime, I will be content with the lighted ceramic tree, which reminds me of one my Victorian-esque Aunties had;  the little orchestra is a family heirloom, the figurines are marked on the bottom: "Made in Occupied Japan."

There's also a tiny tree, below, 2.5 inches, smaller than our usual 7-foot Noble fir,  with awestruck mice (the Wizard has a thing for these tiny miniatures), and a clever hand-made crocheted tree, right, bought from a local crafter.  It is on my desk in my office, cozily displayed next to a ceramic fireplace, chair, bag of gifts and, again, some mice, a cat in a Christmas stocking hat, and a Chinese dragon.

So in lieu of the actual sacrifice, I at least have some tangible references to it. (Sort of like crucifixes, but more cheerful.) And I do have lots of lights on hand, not in the storage locker,  to string all over the place.

In the meantime, while burning scented candles and playing holiday music,  I will offer incense to the memory of the albizias that were pointlessly sacrificed, destroying the view from my lanai and the habitat of a lot of birds.  I know this seems all contradictory and conflicted.  That's the nature of sacrifice.