One of my fondest memories as a child was the Christmas my father decided we would cut down our own Christmas tree instead of buying one from a parking lot in our city. It was a laborious event but something that I still hold special to this day, so the efforts have paid off tremendously!
The morning my father picked for the tree cutting adventure was on an extra cold Saturday and it was raining on and off. It was somewhere in the hills close to our city, but as a child the drive seemed like it went on forever. We followed the road twisting into the hills listening to Christmas music in my father’s old Ford pickup until we reached a sign for the tree farm pointing us down a dirt road. The dirt road was graveled for a few hundred feet then it became rutty, rough, and slick with mud. After bumping along the road for a while, there was a clearing being used as a parking lot which was surprisingly full of cars.
After parking I hurried out of the truck stepping into deep mud and losing a shoe. My father had not even gotten his seat belt off and I was already a mess. With cold wet muddy feet, I followed my father into the woods. We trekked for about twenty minutes through a maze of muddy trails and a forest of stumps with hardly a tree in site. We wandered around quite a bit before we found any trees that would not require a team of men and seven oxen to cut down and haul away.
Alas my father spotted the perfect tree. Now up until this present day, my father has never owned a chainsaw, only an axe, which could have been handed down for generations since the Stone Age. Most people would at least use a saw, but not my father, and twenty minutes later he is out of breath with blistered hands, and you can only imagine the words coming out of his mouth! My father dragged the tree behind him which must have measured all of ten feet. We were half way back to the truck when he realized I did not have his axe so we turned back around and by then a light rain had started. In the end, we did make it home alive with the tree. However, our clothes were wet, my shoes were destroyed, the truck was dirtier than it had ever been, and it took around three hours more time than to have just gone to the local tree lot.
So why would I consider this a fond memory of Christmas with all the hardships to get a tree? The reason is that I do not really have any memories of all the times we had gone to the local lots to buy a tree. Going to the local lots was always simple and fast, it only took ten minutes or so to find the “perfect” tree. But that time we went to cut one down will always be sacred to me as it was an enough of enduring experience to have impacted me for life, a true bonding moment with my father.