Postcards from the Rogue Valley

The winter holiday season is here—it arrived before Thanksgiving if you didn’t notice—and for some of us dedicated to an annual hunt for the best Christmas tree, the debate continues: real evergreen or faux. 

The National Christmas Tree Association estimates that more than three-quarters of the Christmas trees on display in 2019 will be artificial. People who prefer artificial trees say they are better for allergies, more convenient, and less likely to get knocked over by cats and toddlers. Maybe they’ve heard Teddy Roosevelt’s 1901 declaration: “It’s not good to cut down trees for mere decoration.”

Here in Oregon, however, live Christmas trees are a serious business. This year, Oregon will harvest over 5 million Christmas trees. Ninety-two percent, alive but netted, will travel to other parts of the country, ending up at chain stores and garden shops, open lots and city sidewalks. Oregon is the biggest producer and exporter of Christmas trees of any state in the U.S. 

Appearing one day in late November and disappearing a month later, these humble trees are short lived, whether Noble firs from Oregon’s Clackamas County or Frasers from the Blue Ridge Mountains. They are a cash crop, bred for human consumption.

But how we celebrate them! For three weeks, these outdoor citizens take center stage in our houses. We fasten lights and ornaments to their boughs and lay concealed robots and fleece pajamas at their trunks. We circle them with song, play, and laughter. We include them in family portraits. In return, they ask for only one thing: water. 

The tree-loving, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers, in his new book The Overstory, writes: “My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”  

For 34 years, Ashland has won recognition from the National Arbor Day Foundation as a “Tree City USA.” The city’s street tree guide for residents who want to help create an urban forest, published by the Ashland Tree Commission, includes 51 trees and runs 70 pages.  It’s not surprising that many folks here in Southern Oregon want their Christmas trees “real.” 

At the  employee-owned Bi-Mart, bundled trees began filling the sidewalk next to the parking lot before Thanksgiving. The upscale Ashland Food Coop offered a range of trees packaged with their root ball, ranging from $19.99 for a two-foot sapling to $199 for a six-foot Nordman fir that would eventually become 30-60 feet high and 15-25 feet wide. The popular U Cut Christmas Tree Farm, 15 miles north of Ashland, lost its farming equipment in a fire this summer, but a Go Fund Me campaign put it back in business. Customers tagged 900 of U-Cut’s allotted 1,000 trees the first day it opened.

 (You may remember National Lampoon’s 1989 film with Chevy Chase, Christmas Vacation. With Christmas only a few weeks away, Chicago resident Clark Griswold heads with his family to a tree farm. After walking through the snow for hours, he finds the largest tree he can, but forgot to bring tools to cut it down and pulls it out by its roots—decidedly against the law.) 

In the Western United States, a number of national forests sell permits that allow people to cut down their own Christmas tree in the wild. Oregon is one of these states—permits cost $5.  The rules are simple: Trees must be less than 12 feet tall, you can only cut a tree within 15 feet of another tree, and tree stumps must be less than 12 inches after cutting.

My own experience with Christmas trees, live with one exception, is wide-ranging and unsentimental. In Princeton, New Jersey, where I lived until moving to Los Angeles when I was 12, what stands out wasn’t where our family secured each year’s tree, but what happened when it joined us inside. I took on the decorations—mostly from the Five and Dime Store—and my two older brothers handled the lights and the tinsel. It was not pretty. They strung the lights in a haphazard blitz, I hung the fragile ball and bells with inordinate care and, from the far corners of the living room, they threw handfuls of tinsel at the tree, largely obliterating the ornaments. 

When my parents divorced and I moved with my mother to Los Angeles, where her new husband waited, I discovered artificial trees for the first time. Come Christmas, LA became a true tinsel town as lots sprang up across the city with pastel trees and fake snow. We always returned to Princeton for the holidays where we made a last-minute search for a fresh tree with personality.

In Rhode Island, where Tony and I raised our boys, we alternated holiday gatherings between my Long Island brother and his family and my upstate New York brother and his. Sometimes, Carl and Dan would make the case for our having a tree, too, even if it would spend Christmas alone. 

The best Rhode Island holiday was when both sons, then in their late 20’s and early 30’s, arrived with their partners, Kidist from Ethiopia and Einor from Israel. The newcomers decorated the tree from top to bottom (requiring a run for additional ornaments). “So this is an American Christmas tree!” Einor said. “A native.”

A low point in my holiday tree life was in Brooklyn, where Tony and I had moved to help Kidist and Carl take care of their new baby. We were living in a small, fourth-floor walk-up. A few days before Christmas, I searched for a very small tree for our apartment, but I came up empty-handed. The temperature was a record-breaking 65 degrees and on the way home, on the sidewalk near our apartment, I found a discarded, fake but pristine ficus tree. Dressed in red bows with an angel at the top, the ficus proved a worthy understudy.

“This is not our world with trees in it,” writes Richard Powers in The Overstory. “It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.” 

In our backyard, we have a 80-foot redwood tree that is probably that many years old. A blue Cyprus towers in front of the house. Almost every day, Tony and I hike in the woods near us and return glad to be alive. Trees know when we are close by, current research suggests, and the chemistry of their roots and leaves sweetens. 

When it comes to Christmas trees, I’ve lost my footing. We cut and decorate them, and for a few weeks they are heroes, welcomed into our homes and treated like royalty. We applaud their erectness, their figure, their scent. Then one day we turn them out. Close to death, they are no longer able to absorb the water they need. They leave their dry needles behind for the vacuum. Happily, some become mulch.

SUBSCRIBE
Add your name to the email “blast” announcing new posts. Please send your name and email address to: subscribe@postcards-from-the-rogue-valley.blog