Every year we go to a Christmas tree farm where we live in rural Montana, and cut down a Frasier fir. We make a day out of it. We listen to Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra singing old Christmas tunes in the car on the way there. We laugh. The adults act like children and the children act like smaller children. We bring hot cider in a thermos and peppermint bark candy and sometimes a little whiskey for my husband and me. We are all easy on each other. We are all Christmas-kissed.
It took us a while to get our tradition right. One year, the year our first child was born, we were frazzled enough to go to a Christmas tree yard in town. (Remember, we live in Montana -- the land of the evergreen). We spent $90.00 on the most gorgeous Frazier fir. That sounded about right. We'd recently moved to Montana from the city. That's about what a Frazier fir ran. I asked the cashier where the tree was from, assuming that it was at least from some little corner of Montana. "Wisconsin," she said, smiling. Probably cut down in September, sprayed with green preservative, and shipped out here in a truck. We agreed would would NOT tell anyone where our tree was from that year.
Then for a few years, we used to go out in the woods and cut down a tree, but we didn't like how we went from environmentalists to opportunists, stalking the perfect tree, looking suddenly at the forest like a decorator's showroom, considering taking the full tops off 30 foot trees just for our living room pleasure. The Charlie Brown trees that needed to be thinned were not enough for our years of inherited and collected ornaments. No that had to stop. A farmed tree was always meant for one purpose, and it usually had been loved and nurtured by someone who needed the extra cash come Christmas time.
So every year we go to this little tree farm about twenty miles from our house, and every year I feel a wash of newness and simplicity. We know to take it slowly, marching around in the snow, shaking hands with trees to make sure we don't end up with a dread prickly spruce. We have fake arguments about who picked the keeper last year, who will find the prize this year. We pretend we hear its call. We let our kids carry saws when they were too young, the punchy snow so forgiving. We take turns with the cut. We giggle and clap our hands when it finally falls over in a little timber that couldn't really hurt anyone if it tried. We love watching my husband drag it through the snow like he's just bagged a buck that will feed our family for the winter. Like it's a hundred years ago. And it is like it's a hundred years ago. No one pushes any buttons. No one has anything pressed to their ear except for maybe a wet mitten. I love this day. We all love this day.
And maybe for that, in the last two years, something really beautiful has occurred. As we erect the tree getting ready to proudly mount it atop the truck, my husband, with his dirty XL manly work gloves deep in its branches, stops and sighs and says, "A nest!" And we all peer in and sure enough, there's a nest. "That's pro," my ten year old son said this year. "Of course it's pro," said my fourteen year old daughter. "It's a bird nest. All birds are pros." And that big work glove carefully extracts a tight, dried mud nest, woven with horse hair, and full of flaxen larch needles. I have last year's nest on my windowsill in my office, and will put this year's next to it as a reminder of what it is to receive life's little gifts, especially at Christmas time. I like to believe that nature showers love on the people wanting to receive it.
Icelandic lore says that a bird nest in a Christmas tree means a year of health and fortune for the whole family. I wish health and fortune to The Huffington Post family. Happy 2011 to you all from Montana.
cross-linked to These Here Hills