DECEMBER 14, 2020 – Christmas trees are now the shortage item that T.P. was in March. The local Lions Club, which has a large stock (trees, not T.P.) right through Big Star Day, had already closed two weeks ago. The nearby University of Minnesota Forestry Club had never opened in the first place. The Men’s Catholic Tree Lot—completely out . . . of a small inventory. Home Depot some miles away? Only scragglers left.
After a thorough internet/phone search, my wife found a promising prospect: Menards, the building supply retailer, six miles away. As I drove our sleigh through falling snow dust, I contemplated our predicament. If paper toilet could battle back, why the shortage of Christmas trees? I mean, even the “cut your own” farms in the area were closed. None of this could be explained, especially given that Christmas tree sales are exclusively an outdoor activity—unless you’re going artificial.
Ironically, up in the Northwoods from which I’d emerged the day before, we have thousands of potential Christmas trees from which to choose a single tree. This had occurred to me before my departure from the woods, but easier said than done. I wasn’t about to harvest any of the hundreds of “candidates” that I’d laboriously planted and tended over the past few years. And when it comes to cutting any “volunteer” pine—I simply can’t do it.
I am to evergreens what an animal rights fanatic is to large, wild mammals—though like many who wouldn’t kill but are voracious consumers of supermarket beefsteak, I think nothing of buying a plantation evergreen that someone else has chopped down far away to sell at an asphalt parking lot. When it comes to thinning trees in a dense, young grove of pine, I readily devise reasons not to saw: “Every one of these trees catches the rain and slows run-off down the bank to the lake—keeping the water clean,” I’ll say to self. “Or, w-w-w-A-A-I-T right there, fella! The little sapling you’re about to cut, though the runt in a cluster of five young saplings, added eight inches of growth this season. It’s a fighter, a survivor, a thriver. Who are you to decide which among these half dozen trees get to live and which do not? Play God a year from now . . . maybe two or three.” And so it goes . . . to keep on growing.
In Menard’s outdoor lot, I found a fine stock of trees—and oddly, no other customers. The young woman in charge greeted me cheerfully and said, “I’ve got lots of white pine over here.” White pine indeed. My favorite species and the one in such abundance in our Northwoods “tree garden.” “Thanks,” I said. “But I want a balsam.” I soon found a perfect specimen, and for the bargain price—tax included—of just $32. This precious evergreen now graces our “Christmas room,” thanks to my wife’s command of the decorative arts.
O Tannenbaum . . . wie treu sind deine Blätter!
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
