We haven’t had a Christmas tree in a decade, because you can’t count the artificial palm tree I’d string with lights and plop in front of our RV in Key West. I loved it and it was perfect, for there.
But since we are staying on Shelter Island this year, we had a brief tree conversation. It went like this:
Big or little? I ask. Middle, he says.
Real or fake? I ask. Real, he says.
They cut it or we cut it? I ask. Don’t even start, he says.
Darn, I thought he’d forgotten.
Get a tree, any tree
Back when we had children in the house, the holidays were hectic and far more complicated. There were clothes to buy for holiday concerts, cookies to deliver to class parties, visits to Santa and over-excited kids bouncing off the walls every time you mentioned reindeer.
Back then, getting a tree was incidental. I didn’t even bother to go along to buy one.
“Just bring home something green, wider at the bottom than the top,” I’d say, “or whatever you find. I don’t care.”
Then our kids grew up and there were no more concerts and school parties. And there was no more Santa. So I found myself with more time to concentrate on getting a tree, and wouldn’t it be fun to cut it ourselves! It sure sounds like fun when you’re snug in the comfort of a warm home.
But, it was a bitterly cold winter that year and we went to a tree farm in Southold on an 11-degree day. The wind howled and blew ice pellets that embedded themselves in our faces. We stopped at the first tree we came to, agreed that it was perfect, cut it with the “loaner” hacksaw, and got back into the car before we froze to death. Easy peasy.
When only the perfect tree will do
The next year we returned to the same place on a balmy December Sunday and selecting a tree was not so simple. I walked between the trees, looking and frowning, along with dozens of other people who were also having a difficult time choosing.
One very large, multi-generational group had numbered the trees and tried to select by vote: OK, how many like No. 6? Who likes No. 13? What about No. 28?
The man who monitored the vote and carried the handsaw advised us never to go tree shopping with more than two people. It was 3 o’clock. The voting had started at noon — on the previous weekend.
But a two-person tree-selection committee ensures neither harmony nor speed. There were many couples, like us, doing more walking than tree sawing. I couldn’t believe this was the same tree lot year before, when we were so quick to choose. I heard other people saying the same thing, then I realized why.
The previous year’s weekends were freezing and miserable. A shopper’s tree-blemish tolerance expands as the mercury dips. That gaping hole near the top of a crooked tree is hardly noticeable when your nose hairs are frozen. And a tree with no needles on its upper branches will do just fine when the temperature plus windchill equals a minus number.
In mild weather though, the fussy half of a two-person tree-selection committee becomes even fussier. And if the couple does find the perfect tree, the fussy one will insist they continue looking, just in case there’s a more perfect tree somewhere on a distant acre. I turned down perfectly-shaped trees because of their color, and perfectly-colored trees because of their shape.
One tree, both perfectly colored and shaped, was nixed because, honestly? It looked artificial.
Don’t annoy a man with a hacksaw
“Why is picking out a tree so complicated,” my husband asked, echoing the question other men asked other women, who, like me, assumed the question was rhetorical and ignored it.
We ladies smiled at each other as we roamed between trees, followed dangerously close by tight-lipped Grinches who slapped rusty hacksaws against their thighs, while glaring at the exposed backs of our fragile, trunk-like necks.
Finally, near dark, I found my perfect tree. My husband crawled under it and sawed, and cursed, and sawed, telling me to guide the tree so it fell to the north, “toward Connecticut.”
Connecticut? There I was, all turned around in a tree farm in Southold and he expected me to know where Connecticut was?
Nearby, a woman was defining the term “perfect tree” for her sad-looking husband, who’d mistakenly thought he had finally found one. I asked her if she knew where Connecticut was. While we were trying to figure it out, the tree fell. South.
Her husband helped lift it off my husband who spit out blue spruce needles for a half hour. Obviously it’s not a great Christmas memory for him.
In the interest of peace and harmony I decided to handle the tree issue myself.
And I have not only the perfect one, it’s also unique. Because you don’t see many lit-up palm trees on Shelter Island.
