My work at a garden center this fall ended with the usual end-of-year ritual of this business: the purveying of the holiday greens and Christmas trees.
In my blue-collar childhood, the erection of the Christmas tree was a delirium-inducing affair that heralded a season of anticipation and wonder, of huge snowfalls and piles of gifts covering the apartment's living-room floor. (My father used to work a side job for the now-defunct Parker Brothers toy company, so we were never at a loss for board games. Interestingly, he also worked part-time for a jail situated directly across the road from PB, which may have exacerbated his neuroses. He was not a hardened man, despite his marriage to my mother.)
Because we always had an artificial tree, I, with my child's egotism, assumed this was because artificial trees were superior to their ephemeral natural counterparts, and I pitied my friends who had to settle for fragrant, feathery boughs and disappointingly non-segmented trunks.
The first best part of the tree ritual was my mother telling my father it was time. This was said in a casual way, suggestive of a choice in the matter, but the sudden silence, the angry terror on my father's face revealed the truth: he was that tree's bitch, and we all knew it.
The tree resided in the cellar in a huge cardboard box that got more battered each year. It was comprised of a three-part central pole that screwed together and contained color-coded holes that matched -- once upon a time -- the paint on the wire ends of the tree "branches." These were heavy, twisted wire covered in some form of plastic blue-green bristles that endeavored to look coniferous. The overall effect was of an overly large broom handle sprouting green toilet brushes.
Over the years, the paint on the "branch" ends began to wear off, which led to the second part of the tree ritual: the arguing. We kids enjoyed this almost as much as the decorating. My father would try in vain to insert the branches correctly the first time so as to avoid my mother's editorializing, but we all knew this was a futile endeavor, and watched his progress with the combination of pity and glee usually reserved for kids who threw up in school.
After a period of criticizing by my mother, yelling by my father, and taunting laughter from us kids, my father had to string the lights. This was the '70s, so a broken strand would be fixed by unscrewing the large, offending bulb and replacing it. It was our job to find the bulb, which we did with gusto. After this, we all decorated the tree, a process that restored harmony as we happily dug out our favorite pieces and hung them, transforming a hideous monstrosity into something beautiful and bright.
If our family Christmas-tree ritual smacked of Tennessee Williams, the tree drama that played out in the garden center was a mix of Shakespearean melodrama and operatic tragedy.
We started with over 1,400 trees from Quebec province. Purchases began the day after Thanksgiving, with people concerned about the "freshness" of the trees, but demurring at the suggestion of a $3.49 bottle of preservative that would actually keep them fresh, sensing some kind of compensatory scam.
The Frasier Firs went first, because this is a clientele that believes in Better and Worse, and they want Better, always. The center indulges this by selling Frasiers that have been sheared in the last year for a denser, more traditional shape. The hoi polloi settle for balsam firs.
(I'd always gotten my trees from supermarket parking lots, and a pop-up lot manned by a gentle if embittered semi-alcoholic selling trees from a tiny trailer. My criteria had been size --small, please-- and price --also small, please).
Watching people inspect trees with all the intensity of affluent but barren couples in a Chinese orphanage was another new exposure to The Way Rich White People Think.
And then, a week before Christmas, we sold out. We bought several trees from local vendors also down to the dregs, but who kept the few remaining larger ones for their own customers. Stragglers hurried in, desperate and astonished, their faces masks of the dawning hysteria from forays to other tree yards that places were emptying, that they had waited too long. They looked in tattered shock at the few trees we had left.
"Are these all the trees you have?" they'd squeak in Puccinic dismay.
"Uh, yes. How many do you need?"
"Well, one, but.."
"Well, we have more than one."
But they wanted choice. They wanted to believe that the tree they bought was a special tree, a tree for them; picking from a cluster of five trees, albeit perfectly good ones, hinted at remainders, of other people's cast-offs, and that would not do.
When we were down to about four trees, an older man and and his wife arrived; he looked at the small selection in disdain and, shoulders back and three-quarters turned in a way that recalled nothing so much as Macbeth cheating to the audience as he cried Lay on Macduff! he announced to me across the tarmac, "I have been buying trees here for TWENTY-ONE years, and this is the first time I won't be buying my tree here!"
"We do have trees," I said, gesturing, courteous but unmoved by his existential crisis. "We did have over fourteen hundred, but they sold out."
Because people who make this such a fucking life-or-death event have the sense to not wait seven days from Christmas to shop for a tree.
"They aren't large enough!!!"
Ah, yes. The large tree. The one that will rise like Babel's Tower under the cathedral ceiling/in the atrium/next to the fireplace. The one designed to impress. There were at least two trees remaining that could honestly claim six feet, but no. No, they would not do. They lacked presence.
The man looked at his poor wife and announced balefully, "I guess we won't have a tree this year!"
From my cashier's window in the unheated shed where I'd spent four hours in thirty-degree weather, I smiled my broadest smile, leaned forward, and said,
"But you have each other."
