The Taming of the Tree

By Jim Pfiffer

Here’s a funny Christmas tree story recently told to me by a friend about a boy in the third grade in the early 1960s.

It was the week before Christmas and the boy’s classmates wanted a Christmas tree, but they had no money to buy one. The boy said he knew of a nearby place where he could get a free tree and deliver it.

This kid was a class-clown-wise guy with a bad rep. He was what the education profession, back then, professionally termed as a “% $#X!^ pain in the ass.”

His classmates wondered if he could be trusted to do as he promised.

Christmas was a few days away. There was no other option. The class agreed to let the boy get a tree, thinking “Maybe, just this once, because it’s Christmas and all, this #^@#$ will do something right.”

He did. He got a beautiful Scotch pine and dragged it to school the next morning. The tree was well-proportioned, trimmed and symmetrical. Not too big and not too small. It was perfect.

The students and teacher rejoiced and hailed the lad as a holiday hero as they patted him on the back and thanked him for his generous Christmas spirit.

The classroom was alive with holiday gaiety as the students sang Christmas carols and made paper chains, strings of popcorn and colored construction paper gingerbread men to decorate the beautiful “Oh Tannenbaum.”

Hallelujah! It was a Christmas miracle.

Not for long.

The tree did, indeed, come from nearby – from the nearby country club.

Our young Paul Bunyan had risen early, gone onto the club golf course and chopped down one of the beautiful landscaped trees.

How did the country club officials know the thief was at the school?

That was easy; they followed the trail of pine needles on the snow-packed path created when he dragged the tree to school.

I know some of you think the kid was me. I assure you it wasn’t, but I salute his resourcefulness. If I had done it, I would have dragged the tree to a neighbor’s house and then carried it to school, thereby putting the trail and the blame on the neighbor.

Like most of us, I have done battle with many Christmas trees. Christmas trees are like wild animals. They don’t want to be cut down and brought inside where you try to keep them alive by placing them in a shoe box lined with cotton and feeding them warm milk from an eye dropper. No, wait, that’s baby birds.

We try to keep trees alive by sticking them in a pot of water.

Wild trees can’t be domesticated, like dogs. Trees belong outdoors, in nature, where they can frolic and run free with their own kind.

That’s why a live tree, brought inside, will instinctually fight you with every needle of its being. The tree’s four main defense mechanisms include: 

1. Chemical: getting sticky sap all over your hands, clothes and hair (sap that can’t be washed off with any soap, water or any solvent known to man).

2. Mechanical: tipping over and spilling tree stand water all over the gifts.

3. Painful: Poking you in the face with sharp needles.

4. Thermal: Bursting into flames and burning your home to the ground.

Some Christmas trees, like the spruce, our preferred Christmas tree, use a more insidious defense. It sheds needles. If we touch it, brush against it when we walk by, turn up the TV too loud or stare at it for too long, it drops needles like a Charlie Brown tree in a hurricane.

Spruce needles litter our hardwood floors, rugs, furniture, stocking feet, and the dog’s fur. Our house smells like Pine-Sol.

By the time Christmas arrives, our tree is going to be a bare brown skinny skeleton of a trunk and branches.

Each year, we continue to try to domesticate wild conifers. It’s a Christmas tradition and features sticky pine sap hands, pine needles in the face, tipped-over pine trees and spilled pine tree water.

And sometimes, in a pinch, the tradition requires a trip to the country club golf course.

Get more Jim Pfiffer humor on his Facebook page and his “Full of Wit” blog. To learn more about Filomena Jack, see her artwork and contact her, go to www.FilomenaJackStudio.com.