What loss and a desperate Christmas Eve search for a tree taught me about the holidays

When I was a kid growing up in Marquette, Mich., the notion that my father, a U.S. Forest Service scientist, would go to a lot to buy a Christmas tree was unthinkable.

Inconceivable, actually. We would drive out to a nearby “experimental” forest in Dukes, Mich., select the unlucky candidate, cut it down, tie it to the luggage rack of our aquamarine 1965 Chevy Impala and call it good.

Dad used a huge bow saw with which, I recall, he once cut his thigh open. Fortunately, none of our yuletide tree excursions resulted in a major injury.

Fast-forward 45 years to Dec. 23, 2011, exactly a decade ago.

By then a single father, I was always careful to make sure my kids had a serviceable festive holiday tableau. In fact, I used the phrase “festive holiday tableau” with my kids. By 2011, they were all young adults.

The physics of putting up a Christmas tree always baffled me. My tree stands were always propped up by a book, and if gravity was still working against me, I would surreptitiously anchor the tree with a six-pound test fishing line. The appearance of physics is always more important than actual physics.

On this Dec. 23, my father had died earlier in the year, and many of you know what that’s like. The first Christmas after a loved one passes is poignant, and my mind and heart were filled with those indelible memories of getting a tree, for starters.

In 1966, instead of leaving out Christmas cookies for Santa, my dad suggested that we leave out a martini for Santa. As a 6-year-old, I was unaware of how to prepare one, so my mom did it. Have a “Mad Men” Christmas, folks. And Santa did indeed finish off the martini. He also left a note thanking me, in my dad’s almost indecipherable scrawl. Spoiler alert.

On the evening of Dec. 23, 2011, I dutifully went to a Christmas tree lot (horrors!) and got a perfectly fine 7-foot tree, threw it on the top of my Chevy (gold, not aquamarine) and left it on the front porch of my house.

When I left for work the next morning, it was there. When I returned home around 6 p.m., it was not.

“What kind of a (fill in your word here) would steal a Christmas tree?” I wondered. Did the Grinch sneak down from Whoville?

All I know is, on Christmas Eve, at 6 p.m., I had no tree. The prospect of any tree lot being open was long past, but I raced over to a closed lot near where I lived at the time in Beaverton, Ore.

There is nothing grimmer than the remains of a Christmas tree lot in Beaverton during the usual drippy 37-degree weather. There was one sad little scrap of a tree lying on its side, wet and alone, that would rival Charlie Brown’s tree for pathos.

I left it there and drove to Target as fast as I could.

Target was closing at 7 p.m. I ran into the store at 6:50. This left me just enough time to run to the back of the store and see what they had for fake trees.

I had studiously avoided the fake tree scene because of my Forest Service upbringing, but here I was. The only available trees were monsters at something like a $300 price point, and I wasn’t going there.

Then I found one forlorn affordable tree (“affordable” is the most charitable word I can muster) in a box. I grabbed it, paid and raced out the door as the Target lights dimmed and the locks clicked.

I put it up, with the Charlie Brown Christmas music (doo doo doooo …) running through my head, threw every light and ornament I had on it, and it still looked … forlorn. But it was, in fact, a (fake) Christmas tree.

The next day, I thought about who might have stolen my Christmas tree. It may have been a person who could not, in fact, afford a $60 tree and was as desperate as I was to get one for my kids.

I hope his kids enjoyed it. I don’t condone it, but I get it.

As for my forlorn tree, I put it up every year to remind me that Christmas isn’t about trees.

After a Christmas martini, my dad probably would have approved.

This story was originally published December 23, 2021 at 5:00 AM.