Cutting your own Christmas tree is traditional!

Around the northern and the agricultural regions of our country the bringing in of the evergreen at Christmas time was always a holiday highlight.  Ask some of the seniors in your family or your area about that activity and be ready for a parade of happy stories.

Many will relate that little was said about the procurement of a tree ahead of time.  Little was said and little was asked, although Dad and often big brother, too, had provided for that part of the family Christmas.  Perhaps months before, walks had been taken into the hills after chores had been completed and a perfect pine selected for cutting later on. 

Days before holiday preparations had reached their peak, the tree was revisited, cut and dragged to some secret place, behind the barn, behind a shed or secured behind a silo door.  On Christmas Eve it would magically appear, and in the morning greet the expectant family, bedecked with homemade trimmings.  Almost as magically it would leave the premises once the celebration had been completed.

In those days, the stories go, there were wild trees almost everywhere and the only expense involved was the time spent away from other work.  Almost everyone who wanted one could have a tree.

But as the years passed, the demand grew and the open places became fenced and posted.  Christmas trees became a seasonal product, sold by merchants from the north mostly, with access to great numbers of pines.  Customers grew fussy about height and shape, and successful vendors paid more and more attention to straight trunks and perfectly formed trees.  For that they got more and more money.  Very few “Charlie Brown” trees showed up in the lots.

And instead of waiting until days before Christmas to cut these “perfect” trees, they were cut weeks, even months ahead of time.  Sometimes painted to preserve their color, they often gave up their needles in the warmth of the house.

Enter the artificial tree.  At first poor imitations, they later became almost clones of the real thing.  They could be taken down, boxed, and used year after year.  They cost five times what a real tree cost, but they didn’t shed their needles.  They didn’t smell like pine either.

From a time the artificial trees and the cost of raising real ones, threatened the industry.  So did the environmentalist’s concerns that the world was being denuded of the forests.  But intense planting efforts and programs aimed at recycling trees for manufacture of particle board after the holidays, helped lessen those concerns.  Christmas trees are a renewable crop and when the vendor, middleman can be eliminated, are still a profitable business.  Often they can be grown on land that would not support other crops.

Now there are options.  Artificial trees are there for the person seeking to avoid a yellowish cast of falling needles.  Near perfectly shaped live trees are there in the lots for the affluent, willing to pay $30 to $50 for two weeks of enjoyment and decoration.  And more and more there are the fields of “cut your own” trees for considerably less.

We cut our own tree this year.  It wasn’t just to avoid the high prices either.  It was more to get in on some of the tradition.  With a saw in hand we walked through acres of pines planted for the cutting.  So did lots of other people.

Families debated the qualities of less than straight and less than perfect specimens.  They finally agreed on a selection, cut it themselves and dragged it from the cultivated woods.  There were, it seemed to me, more smiles and peals of laughter than on the average lots.  In a way we had returned full circle to the times that seniors recall.  We had cut our own tree and preserved a special part of Christmas!