(c) Celine Sparks, 2022
It’s one of the greatest experiences of the holiday season. I mean, it appears to be from the Facebook pages. People ride on wagons while they sip hot cider with a cinnamon stick protruding out the top. None of it spills.
They are on a farm of rows of evergreens, and it’s time to select the tree that will grace their family room. I’ve pretty much decided they’re aliens because they all agree on the same tree, and that hasn’t happened yet on this planet.
Yeah, on the internet, I also see that you’re supposed to wear color-coordinated sweaters, if not matching pajamas – another reason I’m pretty sure at least the dad is not from planet earth. I think there’s a hormone missing somewhere here. Who talked him into this? Who? I’d like to pay you to come and talk ours into at least coordinating the eating utensils into like groups before tossing them in the drawer.
It also magically snows in the picture, and no one seems cold. Not even slightly.
Here’s how it happens in real life. You start calling around to see if you can find a place that sells Christmas trees for less than the price of Taylor Swift tickets. Apparently all the trees this year have diamond needles attached to 14K gold branches surrounded by shredded Michael Kors sweaters for mulch. The price tags reflect more inflation than the Goodyear Blimp.
We finally found a place in Shelbyville, Tennessee that sold the trees for half the price of the other tree farms, which means you only have to go to bankruptcy court and not directly to prison.
While it used to be a tradition for us to take the entire family for tree-picking day, they’ve grown up and have better things to do – sales like black Friday, red Monday, and gray Thursday – so we take who’s available. And around here, that’s starting to look like the mole who’s tearing up our lawn.
I ran upstairs to tell my lone son here, “We found a place cheap enough! Come one and … well, come one.” He was apparently on the most serious phone call of his life, and didn’t think he could make it.
My husband and I had one of those whisper conferences in the kitchen. “Well, should we leave him? Should we go tomorrow instead of today?”
“There won’t be any trees left at this price.”
We envisioned teams of investors pulling up in 18-wheeler flatbeds and selling them on the black market. All the people who couldn’t break through to scalp those Swift tickets would start scalping Christmas trees.
“Let’s just wait and see what happens with the phone call.”
“Number one, the way he looks, we can make another Somebody Ruins Christmas movie – “
“That’s SAVES Christmas. Don’t you know? It’s always saves. Christmas has been saved more times than the crowds at the Rick and Bubba tour.”
“Well, around here it’s ruins. But anyway, secondly, by the time he gets off the phone, we may be losing daylight hours.” We always seem to run into this problem and we pull what looked fine in the dark into our living room, put lights on it, and it’s suddenly shaped like the Yucatán Peninsula with a hernia.
We finally decide to leave him here, which is what he’s begged us to do, and when I went upstairs to tell him, he bounded out of his room ready to go as if the phone call ended in an all-expenses-paid trip to Hot Cheeto-land. He told us we had to really hurry back, though, because one of his out-of-town friends would be there by six, and would be wondering where everyone was.
We piled into the truck. Wait! Three people in the truck? Well, it does have those drop down side-ways seats in the back made for small children. I suddenly qualified as “small children” even though I may or may not be slightly over the weight limit. I felt like that middle piece of bread in a Big Mac.
This farm really is “over the river and through the woods.” In fact it’s over a twisty, turny mountain, and every time I go over it, the Christmas carol shifts to “It’s beginning to look a lot like pulling over and heaving in a beautiful wooded, snow scene (minus the snow).” And that’s when I’m sitting fully forward in a roomy front seat in a normal vehicle. I drank a lot of carbonated stuff, I closed my eyes a lot, and I did a lot of self-talk convincing me that I would make it and I would be so happy with a fresh tree. Not sure I believed me.
But we got the deed done, with the biggest event being my actually getting out of the extended cab part of the truck. This was a huge performance in three acts and an encore way more entertaining than the Nutcracker and the Christmas Carol rolled into one. We could have paid for a tree on the expensive side of the mountain if we had sold tickets.
The old memories of indecisive hours measuring, taking pictures, and hiking for days were traded in for a high speed game of barreling down the farm road leaving the families in pajamas in a cloud of dust. The decision process went “OK, there’s one, two, and three. Which one do we like best? And WHERE is the bathroom in this place? Hurry up, so we can make it to the Shell station.”
We cut her, we shook her, we loaded her in the truck, and I looked at her through the back windshield and said, “I know how you feel, honey.”
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