Big tree, big heart

By T. W. Burger

I am sitting here in a comfortable chair with my feet stacked up, all laid-back and comfy, laptop teetering on what remains of my lap, and a mug of hot tea perched nearby. I am thinking about my father.

Standing at the other end of the room is the eastern red cedar we just murdered out in a farm field and mounted on the sill of the bay window.

My father has been dead for more than a quarter-century, but now and then I see him in the mirror, lurking in the bones of my face, or sometimes he kind of floats up unbidden from something I hear or see. This is one of the latter.

You do not usually find eastern red cedars on the Christmas-tree lots or at the “cut-your-own” farms because, for one thing, they’re as common as fleas, they’re prickly, and they do not smell as good as some of the higher-grade commercial trees.

If I had to be pinned down to describe the odor, I would say its bouquet is piney with a soupçon of cat pee. But then again, it was free.

My perception of the smell may, of course, be simply prejudiced by my intense dislike for Christmas. Before you ask, I do not know why. I just do. However, hating it is cheaper than liking it, and takes less time.

The placement of a tree is only a big deal since it is the first I have had in my own residence in 30 years. Sue said she would really like one this year and so now we have one.

Cutting the annual Christmas tree was always a big production for Dad. I think he took me and my brother along every year when he went to go get one. Sometimes we would go to a lot, but the clearest memories are of hiking out into the Georgia piney woods somewhere, cutting down a tree and lashing it to the Dodge for the drive home. 

My father was not an emotive man. He often sat by himself, smoking his Viceroys and staring at some memory or another.

However, some sort of largesse overtook him when it was time to get a Christmas tree. You would have thought he was selecting one for display at the governor’s mansion. Yet I do not think we ever got one that did not need major surgery before we could even get it through the door.

It was sort of a family joke.

I remember one year, in a riot of excess, Dad took me and David, and his bow saw out into the woods to look for “just the right tree.” I do not know about David, but by the time we found this blessed conifer, I thought we had walked all the way to Colorado. It was getting dark, and the tree seemed enormous.

“Gee, it looks, um, big,” I think I told him.

“It is fine,” he said. “It is just right. We do not want a tree that’s too small.”

Not a problem, as it turned out. It took forever to drag it to the station wagon and strap it to the top. When he saw how it dwarfed even the 1958 Dodge, a vehicle roughly the size and maneuverability of a minesweeper, I think Dad was beginning to think that maybe he had gone a little overboard.

I am not saying it was big, but the car looked like a bedroom slipper on which someone had perched a watermelon. It was a really BIG tree.

At home, Mom took one look at it and went to sit in the family room.

The tree would not even go through the door until Dad trussed it up with some clothesline. Then, when he tried to stand it up, he got it to about 45 degrees and the top hit the ceiling.

Out came the saw, and the clippers.

He sawed, pruned, and tried again. Still too tall. And again.

Ditto.

The third time did it. There it stood, massive, occupying a third of the living room. The Tree.

Well, not so much a tree, as a green furry cylinder. Dad had to trim it from both ends, so that by the time he got it upright and bolted into the holder, what we really had was just the center of the pine tree. It seemed to rise out of the floor and go straight up into the ceiling. No cone-shape for the Burger household, no sir. We had us an evergreen silo.

Fortunately, we did not have much furniture. There would not have been any room for it.

It was splendid, once we got all the lights and ornaments, fake snow and phony icicles on it. I took to sleeping on the floor in front of it until Dad came and dragged my sleepy butt back to my bedroom. I loved that tree.

So, today, a little reluctantly, I dragged my Grinch-y self out to that field, selected a cedar, and sawed it off at ground level. I selected a short one, because it was going to stand on that windowsill. I stood in front of it and checked out where the top of it came to, just a little above my eye level.

I maneuvered it through the house and laid it in front of the window where it will stand through the holidays. I looked at the window. I looked at the tree. I looked back at the window.

I distinctly heard my late father say, “It is just right. We do not want a tree that’s too small.”

It must be something genetic. I dragged the tree out to the deck, sawed 8 inches off the trunk, trimmed another 10 or so off the top, and used the clippers to bring it back to something like a taper. Then I carried it carefully back through the house and set it on the sill.

Perfect

T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks,

He is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg, Pa