Daddy and the Last Living Christmas Tree

By Tracy Hensley Bumpus

 

Christmas as a child is always magical. Something about the season captures the imagination and creates memories that rise to the surface decades later. This is such a memory.

When I was just tiny, my parents discovered whenever I was in the same room as a cut Christmas tree, I broke out in spots. This was a terrible thing because my family had a long tradition of cedar Christmas trees harvested off the farmland. The thought of having an artificial tree was just not to be considered. Interestingly, live trees didn’t cause an allergic reaction, so to avoid throwing me into anaphylactic shock my parents started purchasing live, white pine Christmas trees from a tree farm in our county and then planting them in the spring along our property line. (A live tree is one that has the root ball all wrapped up in burlap.)  I can say some of those trees are still standing huge and majestic today.

But there came a Christmas when I was about eight years old that the Christmas tree farm had no stock due to a blight or a drought or something – I can’t recall all these years later. Bottom line was they had no trees that year. This was a full-out Christmas emergency because at the time (before “green” everything), few Christmas tree lots sold live trees. We were in danger of having to get – gasp – an artificial tree.

In the seventies, my mother worked long hours and crazy shifts as a nurse, so Daddy and I were usually left to our own devices. It was up to us to get the Christmas shopping done and find a live tree. The days were getting short toward Christmas, and we had searched every tree lot in our county with no success. One evening after Daddy got off work we decided to travel to a bigger town about 30 miles away. Our plan was to eat at Shoney’s, finish the Christmas shopping, and make a last-ditch effort to find a live tree.

As we were leaving KMart with our last purchases, the weather turned and what had been rain started to become sleet and freezing rain. Now in the South, any kind of precipitation that is frozen or thinks about being frozen instigates an all-out panic in the population. We were thirty miles from home, the roads may become impassable (in our minds), and it was dark. That’s a dire situation.

To make it worse, we had still not found a live tree anywhere in town. It was looking like it was going to be a plastic bottle brush tree for Christmas, or – horrors – no tree at all! As I watched the windshield wipers sweep the sleet from the glass, I was wondering what Santa would think if we didn’t have a tree. Wasn’t there some rule that you had to have a tree for the big guy to stop and leave presents? I was already down one strike because we didn’t have a traditional fireplace with a chimney for him to come down but had to leave the sliding glass door unlocked for Santa. I was starting to panic that my entire Christmas rode on us finding a tree!

Daddy must have read my mind, or at least the look of terror on my face, and said, “Let’s try Rose’s. We’ve not gone there yet.” Roses was an early forerunner of Walmart and a competitor of Kmart – you know, a big box store. In those years, all the big box stores had trees out front leaning against the front wall. It was late in the season, though, and most of the trees left were picked over, dried out, and dead as a doornail. Hope was fading.

As we slid into the parking lot, I was feeling pretty pessimistic. None of these stores ever had live trees; they were always cut trees shipped in from some far-off place with a few cedars thrown in from local farms. There was no chance we would find a live Christmas tree.

A Christmas disaster with no Santa was forming in my mind as we cruised slowly by the front of the store. I had been right – nothing left but the picked over, half-bald ones. Then my dad exclaimed, “There!” My head snapped in the direction he was pointing.

There, slightly hidden behind the dregs of the cut trees was a live tree with its roots all wrapped in burlap. Dad stopped the car, and we jumped out like we were shot from a cannon. Christmas was saved! But as we started moving the cut trees to get to the live tree, my hopes started to plummet. This was the saddest tree ever.

First, it was only about 4 feet tall counting the root ball. Daddy: “We can set it in a number three washtub on some bricks to make it taller.” Next, it was so thin of branches I could see right through it. Daddy: “That’s just more room for the big ornaments.” What branches there were on the tree only grew on one side – the tree was lopsided. Daddy: “We’ll turn that side to the wall.”

Did I mention Daddy was an optimist? Or maybe he was just desperate and knew this was the last tree opportunity we would have. Kids don’t get that nuance. He paid the store clerk for the tree. I think it was $35 which was exorbitant at that time, but I think Daddy would have paid twice that if necessary.

We shifted the gift purchases to the back seat and loaded the tree into the trunk, settling the root ball in the trunk well. The store clerk provided us some twine to tie the trunk lid down as best we could. I was worried because we had thirty miles to go on the big highway with semi-trucks passing us and I just knew every single needle on that tree was going to be gone by the time we got home. We were going to have a stick tree.

Because the weather had turned bad, Daddy took it slow and went the way of the old highway rather than the big new interstate to get home. I kept turning around in my seat to look out the back seat at the trunk to make sure the tree was still there. Daddy must’ve known what was going through my head (what parent wouldn’t?) so he began telling me about the little tree we had “rescued.”

“That tree is lucky we came along when we did,” he said. “Another couple of days and it would have been hauled off to be burned. We got there just in time. Just imagine what an ordeal that poor tree has been through: it was just standing there growing in the field along with all its friends when some man came and dug him up out of his spot. He got loaded on a truck with a bunch of cut trees he didn’t know and that were already dying and sent on a long trip. Don’t you know he was terrified? And then he just sat there at the store and watched people go in and out every day, never looking at him. All the dead trees got picked, but no one wanted him. He was ignored and lonely. How sad he must’ve been!”

Daddy knew all the buttons to push with me, the quiet bookworm child who loved stuffed animals and real animals and had a vivid imagination. I started to think about that tree and how sad it must be, and I went into rescue mode. By the time we got home, that tree was my mission. We were going to make that tree feel part of the family.

The next day, Daddy brought that tree in and sat it in a big metal washtub with a couple of bricks in the bottom to help stabilize it (and provide some lift shoes for the tree). We set it on the step that went down into our living room so if you stood in the living room, it seemed higher. We pulled out all the stops on the decorations. Twinkle lights weren’t born yet so we used the big lights with bulbs the size of nightlight bulbs. We put every string we had on there. Some even had those tin reflector things that made them even brighter. We used every ornament in the box, from the painted wooden dog ornament I made in Brownies to the old ones Mom had made in the fifties. We put on the Snow White and the Seven Dwarves set and the Shiny Bright set from the sixties. As a finishing touch, we went heavy on the tinsel with me throwing handfuls at the barest spots to “fill it in.”

That tree was the best Christmas tree we ever had. It was not perfect, but it was well-loved. It wore it’s ornaments proudly and protected the presents set under its limbs. I talked to it every day and wished it a Merry Christmas every morning. It stood proud when Santa arrive\d that year with my Radio Flyer red wagon with the wooden sides.

In the spring, my dad dug a hole on our back property line and planted that tree. It grew and grew every year and stood strong and healthy even when a blight took some of the other years’ trees to an early death. It’s still there, almost 50 years later. I’m sure the people who live in the house now don’t know what a treasure they have. They have Daddy’s last living Christmas tree standing guard.

 

 

 

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