Cutting Our Own Christmas Tree
Our family headed to the Arizona mountains to find the perfect holiday tree. Norman Rockwell should have painted this moment.
In days gone by, cutting the family Christmas tree was an annual affair. Before the dirt lots lit with sagging lines of light bulbs hung over rows of overpriced conifers, families went into the woods on the back forty of the farm with an axe, the dog, a thermos of hot chocolate, and made an afternoon of it.
Snow laden branches, Pendleton shirts, and a hand drawn sled to haul the freshly cut tree back to the homestead were all part of the idealized picture. You could almost feel Norman Rockwell’s brush against the canvas. The dog bounded through drifts, the kids pummeled each other with powdery snowballs, and faintly, far off in the distance, tiny bells jingled.
Our family wanted to participate in this slice of Americana, to relive days gone by before commercial tree farms spent seven to ten years growing and methodically shearing a tree that would later command a $75 price tag. So we purchased a Christmas tree permit from the Tonto National Forest for a reasonable $15 and decided to make a go of it.
According to the instructions that came with the permit, any species of tree was on the chopping block, as long as it was under ten feet tall and was cut by midnight on Christmas eve.
We updated the red plaid shirts and wooden sled with Thinsulate, fleece, and a sport utility vehicle, and drove towards the town of Young, north of Roosevelt Lake, in central Arizona. We passed pinyon pines on the way up, and if we had gone higher, we’d have seen Douglas firs.
We stopped on a fairly level spot next to an understory of perfectly-sized white fir trees. There were small patches of snow, but it was still and quiet with terrain that suited the hiking skills of a six year old and her mom who was well into the third trimester of pregnancy.
“Hey, there’s one!” my son shouted from the road, and we all scrambled up a short slope, only to find ourselves surrounded by dozens of other candidates. We split up, and our voices echoed across the canyon as we shouted the location of another and yet another that might be the perfect tree. Within an hour, we settled on a nine-footer With a few strokes, we felled it with a hand saw, leaving less than a six-inch stump as the instructions required.
We dragged it back to the car, bound it tightly with spiral wraps of twine, and strapped it to the luggage rack on the roof, but not before the obligatory photo op with father and daughter kneeling proudly alongside their fresh kill.
We stopped at a campground on the way back to eat tepidly warm bean burros from a cold steel picnic table and wondered: Should we feel guilty about our contemporary attempt at a Hallmark moment? Wouldn’t it be more ethical to purchase a tree that was shipped from a commercial tree farm somewhere in Oregon?
As it turns out, the Forest Service thins nearly as many small trees from one forest acre to lessen the catastrophic effects of wildfire as there are Christmas tree permits sold each year in the entire Tonto National Forest. So our single tree, now fully decorated and perfuming our living room as only a freshly cut tree can do, is just a drop in the pine pitch bucket.
We’re already planning next year’s trip, and if there is enough snow, we might have to throw in that sled.
