Lost in a Forest of Tree Choices
Halloween still floats like a chocolate slick on the surface of memory.
Thanksgiving dinner hovers up ahead like a distressed jetliner--fat cells looking for a place to land.
And someone, somewhere, is already selling Christmas trees.
The pro basketball schedule runs well past spring training. By the time the first pitch of the World Series has been thrown out, the pro football season is two months under way.
Why then shouldn’t someone, somewhere, already be selling Christmas trees?
Yuletide officially began last week when, Southern California-fashion, the first Christmas tree of the season fell onto the Pomona Freeway, necessitating a radio traffic alert.
Christmas will be coming soon to a corner near you. For a few weeks, bare concrete places across Los Angeles are briefly, marginally, inauthentically--for pines are not native to these boulevards any more than palms are--reforested. This is not how the Tree People would prefer to do it, but it feeds the illusion of how things might look if they had their way.
Empty lots now swathed in chain link will be green and fragrant with the authentic whiff of pine, and we will remember once again that an evergreen tree is something altogether unlike the cardboard triangle that hangs from the rearview mirror, reeking of pine deodorant.
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On Foothill Boulevard in La Canada Flintridge, on a November night that only a sluggish metabolism could be persuaded was wintry, the future home of Coach Mike’s Trees is nothing but a sign and a fence.
Down the street, though, beneath the swags of white light bulbs that mark a Christmas tree lot as unmistakably as red light bulbs mark something else, is a neat stand of evergreens. The Flower Pavilion, as it has been for 15 years, is open late for the holidays.
These living Christmas trees, pinus radiata No. 5, arrived about a week ago; the cut variety will start showing up, like mall Santas, right after Thanksgiving.
Grapevine reindeer, not yet light-bedecked, lean against a post. Already, the manager, Jimmy Outlaw, is fussing over the poinsettias. Poinsettias aren’t even real flowers, for starters, and because they’re summer plants marketed for a winter season, Outlaw sometimes has to leave the heater on for them.
In the season-less marketplace of Southern California, this gas-station-turned-flower-shop has Christmas trees out front, leftover Halloween pumpkins ranged at the edges, fat French tulips and yellow irises on stems a yard long filling buckets inside, and roses of high-summer pink in the cooler.
Between now and Christmas Day, about 8,000 trees will move through here (and a few buyers will want to examine every one of them). Fifteen extra people will work the lot until the last urban woodsman goes home with his bag lashed to the car roof.
When the season finally exhausts the stock, and the help, the Flower Pavilion returns to its regular hours, giving Outlaw a month to chill before the Valentine’s Day trade cranks up.
The Flower Pavilion is a year-round enterprise with a steady clientele, but the Christmas tree trade is intense in its brevity. Good-cause fund-raiser lots compete with the seasonal for-profits. Forest rangers do battle with day-trippers who want to cut their own.
Before its founder pleaded no contest this year to keeping deer that he decorated as reindeer in inadequate fencing (one of them died, its antlers tangled in fencing and coat hangers), one far-flung operation ran lots all over the state. Miller & Sons Christmas Tree Co. styled itself as “the McDonald’s of the Christmas tree business.”
Its tree-mogul founder began as a teen-ager with a single lot in Granada Hills, and became known for hardball Yuletide tactics, most notably a feud with a rival tree-dealing family that became known as “the Christmas tree wars.”
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A thesis in behavioral psychology is waiting for the scholar willing to monitor the dynamics of Christmas tree selection. Outlaw has watched people spend a half-hour, even longer, measuring, comparing, discussing.
And it is astonishing, really, that some people will spend more time and angst choosing a dead tree that will ornament their house for a fortnight than they will spend picking a car that they’ll drive for five years.
Tree farms have begun to turn out Christmas trees as uniform as bedding plants, which should render it more ritual than choice--but hasn’t.
Living or cut? Plastic or real? Long needle or short? These are telling moral choices: Do you favor the Darwinian tree, the perfect specimen, or the Tiny Tim runt of the evergreen litter, bent and unlovely but as true a tree as any other?
And what about flocking, a substance like nothing in nature but especially not like snow? Now I know what they do to keep busy during the off-season, those construction workers whose job is to hose predigested cottage-cheesy glop onto the ceilings of new buildings.
All that is but prelude to more questions, more grounds for the burdens of choice: large lights or small? Tinsel or none?
Perhaps this will be the year that I settle all those questions in Little Tokyo, with a single word: bonsai.
