The Yuletide Factor. Tim Huff

sixteen that I was engaged in a scientific study of some sort? Was I subject to an inexplicable youthful genius awakening?

      Nope.

      Then how on earth does one so young begin to align the Christmas tree tradition with the very nature of humanity?

      You sell them.

      One of the young adults who led the church youth group I was attending decided to go into the Christmas tree business. Almost ten years my senior, even as I write this John remains a good and faithful friend. Ultimately living out an inspirational and lengthy full-time career in education, back-in-the-day he hired me each December through most of my high school and college years to help out with his own small business venture—Rudolph’s Christmas Trees.

      To this day, when I see a Christmas tree lot with a sign that says all trees are one price, I wince. John took such care that we priced every single tree on the lot individually! Not just by height. How pedestrian. Height was simply one factor. Shape, volume and aesthetic quality were all considered; a handful of us worked alongside John to become Christmas tree connoisseurs. Every night after we fenced the entranceway of our little lot closed, we would move to a stack of bundled trees, cut the twine, and one by one shake them out. My job after closing was then to hold, spin and comment on them, while John painstakingly considered the attributes and worth of each one. I cannot imagine that anyone else has ever put so much thought or care into giving people a square deal on a real tree.

      And it wasn’t just that these trees showed up in bundles and we hoped for the best when we opened them. Oh no. Though I am uncertain of the business arrangement, there were several non-winter days over many years when I made the trek northeast to help John prune fields of trees that he had staked a claim to. Looking back, I see this as representative of John’s legacy in life; I have never known him to commit to anything, or anyone, that does not have 100 percent of his faithfulness.

      While there are five varieties of Christmas trees, including cedar and cypress trees, we, like most Canadians and Americans, specialized in the other three—pine, spruce and fir. Depending on the kind of tree and the geography and climate in which it is grown, the average household-sized tree takes about seven or eight years to grow. With seven kinds of fir, three kinds of pine, and three kinds of spruce popular at Christmas, there is much to take into account when choosing what to grow and sell or what to buy: hue, scent, needle texture, branch stamina, water retention and harvesting endurance. While it may sound a bit nuts to assess and price trees one by one on a little corner plot of rented land, once I knew this reality and these variables, I came to greatly respect and appreciate John’s focused approach.

      I can’t imagine waking every day to the world of retail sales. I have such great admiration for kind and patient salespeople. I am truly in awe of those who work in retail sales of any kind for years, decades and lifelong careers. I did it three and a half weeks a year, after school and on weekends leading up to Christmas Eve, in a brief chapter of my youth, and to this day, when I think on it, I can still feel that fierce burning in the pit of my stomach that so often made me want to scream at the top of my lungs, “You entitled monster, take it, don’t take it, I don’t care!”

      Um, Merry Christmas, right?

      Sigh.

      Fortunately I have only the memory of wanting to do so, not the memory of ever having done so.

      Y’see, while I have no hard statistics on it, I think the law of averages was the same when I was selling Christmas trees as I observe it to this day while standing in line at the grocery store, surveying every half dozen patrons. Three people are going to make you feel good about the human race. Two people are going to make you wonder if some humans are made out of wood. And every sixth person is going to test the limits of your sanity, patience and steam. I like to think that the stats are much gentler in the rest of real life, but I am hard-pressed to believe any different in the world of North American shopping.

      And so it was. Half of all trees would be sold to young adoring parents taking their little ones on a happy adventure filled with glee and anticipation or to a tender-hearted senior citizen looking to take a small pine home to their ailing and beloved spouse or to a gentle someone volunteering to decorate their church sanctuary or school foyer. Some of the stories customers would share were delightful, and the glimpses into people’s lives were often a sweet and unanticipated perk. Lovely people getting it right in so many ways while patiently and thoughtfully including this task and the cost as part of a joyous end result.

      And so it was. One-third of all trees would be sold to a disheveled husband in torn sweatpants mumbling that his wife made him come get a stupid tree and grabbing anything that would fit in the trunk or to a dour couple sighing and moaning repeatedly that it’s not even worth it now that the kids are teenagers and are so unappreciative or to a woeful someone dressed in business-casual who “got stuck” with the job of having to get a tree for their workplace. No time for niceties or small talk. Wringing the experience completely dry of any emotion. A task to complete. Nothing more.

      And so it was. The sixth customer. That unavoidable, painful sixth customer. The single driver who would pull their car up snug against the front fence, lower the window one-third of the way, and ask me to parade and twirl trees in front of them so they wouldn’t have to step out of their vehicle. The headshaking eye-roller who’d spend an entire hour or more of their Saturday morning wandering the lot, up and down the same rows over and over again, assuring me without fail on every single pass that they are positive they could get a similar tree elsewhere cheaper, but never leaving to do so. And of course, the snorting abominable ogre that inevitably appears in all places where humans look to exist harmoniously, possessing the shocking ability to simultaneously self-celebrate and belittle others with seemingly little or no effort. Joy poachers.

      Ugh.

      Prince Albert, where are you? Cleanup on aisle four.

      Taking into account the first group—the happier, healthier bunch of Christmas tree-ers—it’s ironic how their tradition of Christmas trees parallels humanity and how many of us treat one another.

      One day we are all about the tree. It is a high priority. Finding the right tree in a field or on a lot, determining its beauty and worth, feeling proud and pleased with it, admiring and gathering around it to celebrate. And then, mere weeks later, if not just days, it has become a bother and a nuisance. Soon after that, it just needs to be gone. And there always comes a point when there is great satisfaction that it is no more, and all signs that it was ever there have vanished.

      What a terrible shame it is that we all can attach names and faces to the same kind of story. People in our lives who were a priority. People whose beauty and worth we validated. People whom we were proud and pleased to be with. People we admired and gathered with, or for, to celebrate. People whom we later deemed a bother and a nuisance. People we are now relieved to be rid of, without traces of their presence in our lives.