As a kid, we never had a real Christmas tree. We had a large segmented tree that lived most of its life in the attic with the spiders, the long forgotten children’s toys, and dead relative’s furniture. Decorating day as always a to-do. Fighting up the drafty, cluttered, attic steps, to wrestle down the coffin-like box containing the tree and the dozens of smaller dusty boxes filled with ornaments collected over a lifetime.
We’d listen to Christmas carols piece together the tree, and perform the box migration in reverse.
For as long as I’ve lived with Nina (the wife) we’ve only ever had a real tree; mainly, because we would’ve had to have someplace to store an artificial tree when not in use.
Once we went out to a field in Illinois to cut our own and the adventure left me cursing, muddy, and with a tree that would put Charlie Brown on Prozac. I swore, never again.
Never say never, I guess. Now that we live in California, the lion’s share of our friends live up in the foothills, in or near a tiny town called Forest Ranch. Forest Ranch is 30 minutes up the hill, but like a different world to me. I live at 100 feet above sea level. The F.R. folks live at over 3,000. They get snow. They have bears. They wear un-ironic beards. They list shotguns as non-optional tools for living.
Forest Ranch is also the jumping-off point for the real mountains, for the Sierra Nevada that has nothing to do with malt, hops, and yeast. My friends Brian, and Sophia invited Nina and I to the mountains this year for a tree, and despite my previous cut-your-own debacle, we went, and I’m glad we did.
We—Nina and Myself along with three other couples—piled into Brian’s 4-wheel-drive truck and headed up the Humbug road into what they call the “High Lakes” and onto Cody Mountain where, according to one of our group—a Butte County Sherriff’s Deputy—was where pay-dirt-pine was to be found. Deputy Doug doesn’t disappoint, and we were in sap in no-time. Sap and snow about 18 inches deep.
We found a tree (the best of the bunch if you ask me,) cut it down, hauled it back, and head down the hill for a bloody mary at the Bambi Inn, my new favorite watering hole.
We finally got the tree back to our house on the flatland, and despite its overwhelming girth and 24-inch-too-tall height, looked quite nice in the corner of our dining room.
We trimmed it back, cut the tags, strung the lights, and hung the ornaments. If you look at it just right, it almost seems like a Christmas tree. Despite the disposable needle-dropping mess of the real thing, and the effort it takes to find one, I’m not sure I’ll ever want to go back to artificial. This way we get a handsome tree and a fond memory of the mountains to go with it.
