A Short Story By Maureen O’Hara Pesta

Just before Christmas last year, Vernal and I made our annual trek through the holler and down to Millport bottoms to buy a tree. It’s always a project, buying from a tree farm, but we get a nice, fresh-cut pine, just like the old days, sort of.

Mr. Bell, the owner of the Christmas tree farm, has only one arm. He lost his other one in a horrible farm accident — not a Christmas-tree-farm accident, mind you. Although he’s handy with the chainsaw I always feel we should be helping him and not the other way around. 

As we picked our tree, he patiently wandered around the farm with us. And after he cut it down we lugged it across the field to the barn to the tree-shaker machine. “Set ’er up here an’ hold on good and tight,” he said, as Vernal and I hoisted it up and into the shaker. 

It rattled and vibrated violently, and our teeth rattled too. Dead brown needles rained down from the inner branches. 

There’s some excitement to the tree shaker. Will it shake out a mouse or a bird? Not unheard of, Mr. Bell says.

I always felt he earned every cent of the twelve dollars he charged for his trees and then some, especially if it was a rainy cold day, which it was.

The Christmas trees on his farm are pruned regularly, all year long, so that they form a perfect cone shape. A little too perfect, to my way of thinking. Actually, I understand how he’d need to make them look as shapely as the plastic ones from Wal Mart or maybe nobody would buy them.

His trees were all so bushy. So we couldn’t really see the trunk as we made our choice. We just picked one that seemed like a good height for our living room.

Well. 

Our tree had been pruned, and pruned, and pruned again, for many, many years. Sure it looked like a cute little six-foot sapling, but under all those needles and pine cones was lurking the thick trunk of a 20-year-old tree.

Mr. Bell cheerfully acknowledged the fact, and fired up his chainsaw to hack off a couple big chunks of the trunk so it would fit in our little Christmas-tree stand. It’s really something to see — I mean Mr. Bell using that chainsaw. After all, he’s only got one arm. I was getting a little nervous.

He trimmed down the trunk, then stood back to size up his work. “There ya go,” he said with finality. He has many years of experience in matters like these, so we took his judgment as gospel and went on our merry way.

But it was nowhere near enough, we discovered later, in the rain, on our back porch. Vernal laboriously whittled the trunk down some more with a handsaw, until it finally squeezed into our flimsy tin tree stand. We stood it up, then we watched as the tree  slowly and heavily toppled right over. It was just too heavy.

With that, Vernal had had enough. “No tree this year,” he said with finality.

Within minutes of making his announcement, he had heaved the tree over the edge of a gully behind the house, stand and all, dried himself off, took a box of Cheezits out of the kitchen cabinet, parked in his favorite chair, and clicked on the TV.

But the kids were coming home, and a tree was a must.

I retrieved the stand from the gulley and drove 20 miles to a tree lot. No more tree farms for me today. All they had were Frazier Firs, and I bought one, even though it was quite pricey.

Later, back home, the rain still falling, more swear words were uttered as the Frazier Fir was fitted into our cheap stand. It barely stood up, but stand it did.

When the holidays were over, I ordered a big, heavy cast-iron tree stand from L.L. Bean. It came from a foundry in Pennsylvania that had been in business for 102 years. The real McCoy. No more Christmas trees for us that fall over if you look at them wrong, I decided. 

Sometime in January, Vernal was sitting at the desk, paying the bills, when he asked, “What’s this $52 charge from L.L. Bean?”

“A Christmas tree stand,” I told him.

No response.

* * *

We’ll probably go back to Bell’s Tree Farm next year after all. At least now we’ve got a stand that’s up to the job.

My neighbors, Elbert and Joella, have a tall, beautiful fake tree that looks real. But it takes hours to assemble with all its numbered branches. Elbert kept making a fuss about that, so last year they just decided to leave the tree put-together and park it on their back porch. It stood there all spring, summer and fall, under a plastic cover, wedged between the gas grill and a patio table. After Thanksgiving they just yanked it back in the house.

But I don’t think I’d want that. Christmas trees deserve to come and go with a little more excitement than that, and I bet Mr. Bell with his chainsaw, tree-shaker and missing arm would agree.