My recipe for the perfect Yuletide evergreen
Scene: a Christmas tree lot in Alabama. Time: the day after Thanksgiving. A little frost is underfoot, and a nervous Boy Scout with a slightly rumpled kerchief has been following me around for the past half hour as I examine every evergreen on the lot.
Not for amateurs, this business of picking the perfect Christmas tree. A real tree just makes Christmas—pine in the air, sap on the furniture, needles in the carpet, the whole bit. You can’t fake that. No petroleum-based, mold-formed, insert-figure-A-into-stalk-B imitation can take the place of a real tree. That pine-scented spray you’ve got isn’t fooling anybody. Your house smells like a cab.
Let’s begin with the size of the tree. Don’t give me some sad shrub, some Charlie Brown Christmas weed, barely able to hold up the 4-round dough ornament Aunt Helen baked and shellacked in 1978. No, give me a towering Fraser fir or Scotch pine. “I want big, son, big,” I tell the cadet. Every year I buy a tree that far exceeds the house. What caused that gougé down the center of the living room ceiling? The 15-footer of 1998. Those scratches on the side of the front door? That was one fat Fraser.
A big tree sports limbs capable of holding upwards of 300 ornaments. Those ornaments can’t fall; they’re sentimental. If the house starts to burn down, I’m grabbing the 20 boxes of glitter-covered eggs, needlepoint wreaths, and papier-mâché blobs and jumping from the attic. Mine is no decorator tree, headed for the cover of this magazine. It isn’t flocked. It doesn’t have coordinated lavender balls and ribbon. My memories don’t match the furniture.
The tree has to be fresh because there’s no way I’m stringing those tiny modern lights that blink to “Jingle Bells.” My lights were stolen off the runway at LaGuardia. Our electrician had to wire a dedicated “tree circuit.” The power company sends me a fruitcake every year. Think of those big C9 “fire-starter” bulbs from the 1950s, and you’ll get the idea. Carolers at my house wear SPF 30.
Oh, and the lights must be colored. That nearly wrecked my first married Christmas. Wife liked white lights: elegant, spare, understated. Husband thought white lights looked like a restaurant patio. Husband threw tantrum like a 3-year-old. Wife caved; lights are colored.
Maybe this whole tree obsession comes from the time my parents returned home to find me and the 90-year-old babysitter trapped under their fallen tannenbaum. Or from my first Christmas with spectacles: Mama taught me to take off my glasses and look at the lights. (You perfect-vision types have no idea what you’re missing.) And every year since we first met in New York, I’ve surprised my wife with the “best tree on the lot.”
I remember many Christmases and many trees. Some years we sang around them; some we sat under them, opening gifts after relatives left. Other years, I stared at the tree in the dark, pondering the majesty of a 2,000-year-old miracle. Those memories, contrary to what people might say, are the kind that can be placed carefully in a box and brought out to hang on next year’s tree. They’re what really make any evergreen—big or small, fat or skinny, plastic or aluminum—the perfect tree.