Читать книгу The Yuletide Factor - Tim Huff - Страница 14

Chapter 3: Uh-Oh Tannenbaum

What sentiment do I guess I might share with royalty, given the chance?

I mean, there must be a few. At the end of the day, we can’t be too different, can we?

As one who appreciates asking and discovering unlikely answers to obscure questions, I feel safe with this guess—that Prince Albert would feel as sad to see discarded Christmas trees abandoned curbside as I do.

“Prince Albert of Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha.”

With a handle like that on your library card, you’ve got to guess life is going to be complex. Sure, some good, some bad, but mostly lots of complex.

No doubt a few eyebrows are going to be raised when a shy and awkward teenager looks to marry his first cousin. But scrutiny knows no bounds when that young man’s sweetheart kin is the heiress to the British throne.

Married to Queen Victoria by age twenty, he fathered nine children with her and lived an unimaginable reality by her side until his life was ultimately halted by typhoid fever in his early forties.

In his prime he carried a wildly contradictory reputation. Every story as an interloper is matched by one as a respected diplomat. Every tale as a wannabe is challenged by another as an influential statesman. He was known both nobly, with titles such as President of the Society for the Extinction of Slavery, and less consequentially, with designations such as Chairman of the Royal Commission in Charge of Redecorating the Palace of Westminster.

Famous as the man whom Queen Victoria grieved in black over for decades after his passing, the namesake of a lovely city in the Canadian Prairies, and father to a son who inspired an exceedingly popular American pipe tobacco brand, Prince Albert, as lore has it, even has his own strange place in contemporary North American Christmas tradition!

While he didn’t do much of the heavy lifting in shaping the Christmas tree story, he is indeed credited in a big way with putting its tradition on the figurative and literal map.

Long before there was a Prince Albert, or a Prince Albert’s dad, or a Prince Albert’s dad’s dad…way back in ancient days, in ancient lands, many a people in the northern hemisphere believed that the sun was a god and that winter was a sign of the sun god weakening. To celebrate the passing of winter solstice—the shortest day and longest night of the year, and thus the start of healing and wellness of the sun god—it was common to adorn one’s home with evergreen boughs as a reminder of the growth, greenness and warmth that would soon return.

Variations on the same theme and practices abound throughout history and mores. Early Egyptian civilizations and Roman cultures celebrated sun gods with bountiful plant life, while Druids, Celts and Vikings did likewise with symbolic evergreens.

However, Germany is credited with the tree tradition as we know it today. There are both plausible sagas to embrace and bizarre tales that are much less so. The most famous in the plausible category is the one I like to think is true. It is this…

The greatly revered 16th century German Protestant-reformer Martin Luther was composing a sermon while walking through the woods on a crisp winter night. Captivated by the beauty of the stars shining brightly through the trees and exhilarated and inspired by the wonder of God, he would have a tree placed in his home, with candles affixed representing the constellations, as a reminder and in honour of Christ’s birth.

True? False?

Who knows for certain? But I like it.

Very much.

Fast forward a couple of centuries, and we are back to Prince Albert!

Part of the societal fuss over Albert’s marriage to the young queen of England in 1840 was that he was not of British descent. Albert, like Martin Luther, was born and raised in Germany. And so, Albert was a little boy who grew up knowing the German Christmas tradition of the Christmas tree, a tradition he brought with him into his marriage and newly into the Victorian kingdom. One that resulted in a single image sketched in 1848 that spread far and wide, that intrigued and inspired nations and that ultimately launched the Western world’s embrace of the Christmas tree: “the queen’s Christmas tree at Windsor Castle.”

Thank you, Albert.

It’s quite a leap from convoluted royalty and radical reformation to my own Christmas tree attachment, but indeed, I do have one.

Most certainly, I grew up in an age when not only did most Canadian families have a decorated tree in their home at Christmas but anything but a real tree was a bit of a letdown. The artificial tree was still a suspicious notion, trading the ritual of an annual outdoor search for a department store one-time purchase. I grew up among those adamant that nothing could replace the smell of an evergreen in the living room. Admittedly, I am no less biased to this day.

But there is undoubtedly a lot of fuss that accompanies the matter, bother that makes decorative alternatives look mighty good to a number of people. I thought I knew it well enough growing up. I have numerous memories of leaning trees tethered to the wall with shoelaces, pets choking on low hanging ornaments, and needles still blowing out of heating vents months past Christmas.

Even still, it wasn’t until grade 11 that I pushed past the trivial hubbub over the task of choosing and trimming an evergreen and knowingly aligned the tradition of the Christmas tree with the very nature of humanity.

Wow! What a grand statement! One must wonder, was I part of some kind of psychology research project? Was I so advanced by age sixteen that I was engaged in a scientific study of some sort? Was I subject to an inexplicable youthful genius awakening?

Nope.

Then how on earth does one so young begin to align the Christmas tree tradition with the very nature of humanity?

You sell them.

One of the young adults who led the church youth group I was attending decided to go into the Christmas tree business. Almost ten years my senior, even as I write this John remains a good and faithful friend. Ultimately living out an inspirational and lengthy full-time career in education, back-in-the-day he hired me each December through most of my high school and college years to help out with his own small business venture—Rudolph’s Christmas Trees.

To this day, when I see a Christmas tree lot with a sign that says all trees are one price, I wince. John took such care that we priced every single tree on the lot individually! Not just by height. How pedestrian. Height was simply one factor. Shape, volume and aesthetic quality were all considered; a handful of us worked alongside John to become Christmas tree connoisseurs. Every night after we fenced the entranceway of our little lot closed, we would move to a stack of bundled trees, cut the twine, and one by one shake them out. My job after closing was then to hold, spin and comment on them, while John painstakingly considered the attributes and worth of each one. I cannot imagine that anyone else has ever put so much thought or care into giving people a square deal on a real tree.

And it wasn’t just that these trees showed up in bundles and we hoped for the best when we opened them. Oh no. Though I am uncertain of the business arrangement, there were several non-winter days over many years when I made the trek northeast to help John prune fields of trees that he had staked a claim to. Looking back, I see this as representative of John’s legacy in life; I have never known him to commit to anything, or anyone, that does not have 100 percent of his faithfulness.

While there are five varieties of Christmas trees, including cedar and cypress trees, we, like most Canadians and Americans, specialized in the other three—pine, spruce and fir. Depending on the kind of tree and the geography and climate in which it is grown, the average household-sized tree takes about seven or eight years to grow. With seven kinds of fir, three kinds of pine, and three kinds of spruce popular at Christmas, there is much to take into account when choosing what to grow and sell or what to buy: hue, scent, needle texture, branch stamina, water retention and harvesting endurance. While it may sound a bit nuts to assess and price trees one by one on a little corner plot of rented land, once I knew this reality and these variables, I came to greatly respect and appreciate John’s focused approach.

I can’t imagine waking every day to the world of retail sales. I have such great admiration for kind and patient salespeople. I am truly in awe of those who work in retail sales of any kind for years, decades and lifelong careers. I did it three and a half weeks a year, after school and on weekends leading up to Christmas Eve, in a brief chapter of my youth, and to this day, when I think on it, I can still feel that fierce burning in the pit of my stomach that so often made me want to scream at the top of my lungs, “You entitled monster, take it, don’t take it, I don’t care!”

Um, Merry Christmas, right?

Sigh.

Fortunately I have only the memory of wanting to do so, not the memory of ever having done so.

Y’see, while I have no hard statistics on it, I think the law of averages was the same when I was selling Christmas trees as I observe it to this day while standing in line at the grocery store, surveying every half dozen patrons. Three people are going to make you feel good about the human race. Two people are going to make you wonder if some humans are made out of wood. And every sixth person is going to test the limits of your sanity, patience and steam. I like to think that the stats are much gentler in the rest of real life, but I am hard-pressed to believe any different in the world of North American shopping.

And so it was. Half of all trees would be sold to young adoring parents taking their little ones on a happy adventure filled with glee and anticipation or to a tender-hearted senior citizen looking to take a small pine home to their ailing and beloved spouse or to a gentle someone volunteering to decorate their church sanctuary or school foyer. Some of the stories customers would share were delightful, and the glimpses into people’s lives were often a sweet and unanticipated perk. Lovely people getting it right in so many ways while patiently and thoughtfully including this task and the cost as part of a joyous end result.

And so it was. One-third of all trees would be sold to a disheveled husband in torn sweatpants mumbling that his wife made him come get a stupid tree and grabbing anything that would fit in the trunk or to a dour couple sighing and moaning repeatedly that it’s not even worth it now that the kids are teenagers and are so unappreciative or to a woeful someone dressed in business-casual who “got stuck” with the job of having to get a tree for their workplace. No time for niceties or small talk. Wringing the experience completely dry of any emotion. A task to complete. Nothing more.

And so it was. The sixth customer. That unavoidable, painful sixth customer. The single driver who would pull their car up snug against the front fence, lower the window one-third of the way, and ask me to parade and twirl trees in front of them so they wouldn’t have to step out of their vehicle. The headshaking eye-roller who’d spend an entire hour or more of their Saturday morning wandering the lot, up and down the same rows over and over again, assuring me without fail on every single pass that they are positive they could get a similar tree elsewhere cheaper, but never leaving to do so. And of course, the snorting abominable ogre that inevitably appears in all places where humans look to exist harmoniously, possessing the shocking ability to simultaneously self-celebrate and belittle others with seemingly little or no effort. Joy poachers.

Ugh.

Prince Albert, where are you? Cleanup on aisle four.

Taking into account the first group—the happier, healthier bunch of Christmas tree-ers—it’s ironic how their tradition of Christmas trees parallels humanity and how many of us treat one another.

One day we are all about the tree. It is a high priority. Finding the right tree in a field or on a lot, determining its beauty and worth, feeling proud and pleased with it, admiring and gathering around it to celebrate. And then, mere weeks later, if not just days, it has become a bother and a nuisance. Soon after that, it just needs to be gone. And there always comes a point when there is great satisfaction that it is no more, and all signs that it was ever there have vanished.

What a terrible shame it is that we all can attach names and faces to the same kind of story. People in our lives who were a priority. People whose beauty and worth we validated. People whom we were proud and pleased to be with. People we admired and gathered with, or for, to celebrate. People whom we later deemed a bother and a nuisance. People we are now relieved to be rid of, without traces of their presence in our lives.