I always have a real Christmas tree. At least always during the nearly 30 years I've had my condo and hosted Christmas Eve. Throughout the years, I've deployed different strategies for acquiring said real Christmas tree. Years ago, when I was carless, my sister Kath and her husband went with me to pick out a tree from the Belmont Lions Club. Belmont is a charming old suburb, and the tree sale was held in front of the charming old railroad bridge that skirts the edge of Belmont's charming old downtown. Picking out, picking up a tree there is like walking into a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover.
Funny how the brain works. I started to type Saturday Night Live there. No, SNL would be my brother Rich and his pals, when they were at UMass, deciding to open a tree lot one year. Easy money! Quick money! Beer money! Unfortunately, shortly after they opened up shop a major windstorm blew through Amherst, depositing their lot full of trees all over the surrounds, including in the street.
Anyway, at some point my job moved to the burbs and I had to get a car, so I got my own trees. Sometimes from Belmont Lions, sometimes at Mahoney's Garden Store, sometimes at Boston Christmas Tree in Allston. Wherever I got the tree, whoever was there would tie it to the roof my Beetle and off I went. Dreadfully, one time at Mahoney's, exiting their parking lot onto Memorial Drive in the pitch dark, I went over the curb and messed up the Beetle's rocker panel. Now that was an expensive Christmas tree.
Then I didn't have a car again, so a couple of years, my brother Rich took me tree shopping. Here, I will say, I was relying on his car and not on his presumed expertise in things Christmas tree. We got my tree at various unmemorable places.
Then it was just easier to use Zipcar to go out to Boston Christmas Tree, which I would do on a no-traffic Sunday morning a few weeks before Christmas.
That got to be a drag, so the last couple of years I got my tree at the Hill House (community organization) fundraiser tree sale, held just around the corner, in the former firehouse that was where Robert Urich lived on Spenser for Hire. It was easy enough to lug it home, especially if I had my sister Trish to help me lug. (As you can see, I'm most fortunate in that I don't have to rely on the kindness of strangers for much of anything.)
Trish wasn't around, so last year's tree was lugged home by a kid volunteering at the sale (i.e., dragooned into helping by his parents). I gave him a very nice tip for his troubles.
This year, thanks to COVID, Hill House doesn't appear to be having its sale. Just as well. Last year's tree was terrible - so dry, it must have been cut in June. Each day, when I went to fill the well, I used a shovel to clean out the mounds of dry needles surrounding the tree. By the time I took the tree down, it closely resembled a Charlie Brown-er.
So, the other day - my birthday, in fact - I walked with my friend Kyung (masked, of course) down to the EverGreen Seaport tree lot and picked out a very nice, very fresh tree. (I'd seen an EverGreen bicycle delivery guy on the streets. Good advertising.) They delivered it the next day, and - even though I am capable of single-handedly getting a tree of this modest size (a bit over 6 feet) in the stand by myself, if was so worth it to have Dave the deliverer do the honors. (Damn: I forgot to ask him whether he'd come via bicycle. Too busy talking Vermont with him. I recognized the 802 area code when he called to say he was nearing my place, so asked him where he was from. Not that far from where my husband grew up in Bellows Falls, where Dave has a close friend. Hey, I live alone. I like to blah-blah, and Dave was willing.) So there my tree sits, chillaxin and waiting for the boughs to drop. I plan on decorating it this afternoon.
All this didn't come cheap. Between paying for a nicer tree than I would have gotten at Hill House, the delivery fee, the setup fee, the tip, and the overall Boston downtown premium for everything, I think I paid more for this tree than I did for my last four trees combined. Whatever. It's here, it's not shedding, and it smells great.
When we were at the EverGreen lot, they didn't have much inventory. This was the first of December, which seems sort of early to buy a tree, but apparently everyone's getting in the mood early this year. EverGreen was anticipating a big delivery that day. They were in no danger of running out. At least not yet.
What are running out are fresh-cut trees - the ones where you go in person to a tree farm, pick your tree out, and have some guy with a chainsaw cut it down for you. Timber!
As a kid, I pined (hah!) to go tromping in the woods with my father to pick out a tree - which every kid on TV in the fifties seemed to be doing. Alas, my father was not exactly Nature Boy. He did have a couple of saws, but neither was a chainsaw. And he didn't have a hatchet, the TV implement of choice, as I recall. We got our tree from a lot. Some years, we got two trees: a big one for the family room, a smaller one for the living room.
Anyway, getting a fresh-cut tree is just not part of my lived experience, and I don't suppose it ever will be.
But apparently my lived experience is not everyone's, and there's a run on fresh-cuts in these parts.
Whether people are looking to jump start the Christmas spirit or itching to spend time outside with their families after months of staying home, multiple Christmas tree farms in Massachusetts have reported being wiped out of cut-your-own trees, having only shorter trees left to sell, or being sold out altogether.Maple Crest is sold out. They could cut more, but that would be cannibalizing next year's crop. Other farms in the state, as well as in Connecticut and New Hampshire, are sold out as well. Still others only have short trees (six-feet and under, so I'd be right at home) left. Most of the farms still have pre-cut trees, but there goes the thrill of dad getting to pretend he's a lumberjack.
“I think people just needed to get out,” [Maple Crest Farm owner John] Elwell said of the busy post-Thanksgiving weekend, which he said brought 1,200 to 1,500 people to the West Newbury farm. “They wanted to experience the outdoors, and because everything is so limited, they haven’t been able to do any activities with the family. It was a chance to get out in the open air and not worry quite as much about COVID.” (Source: Boston Globe)
According to David Morin, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Christmas Tree Association:
Morin likened the run on Christmas trees that happened over Thanksgiving weekend to people “panic-buying trees like toilet paper.”...more people are looking for real trees this year, partly for the nostalgia factor, and because they have more time on their hands.
Except that you don't have a closet full of Christmas trees...
No comments:
Post a Comment