Oh Christmas Tree, How Stately Yet Sad

People who grow up around forests tend not to be sentimental about trees. Our house, when we were small, had woods on three sides. Trees were a given, like the ocean to a native Angeleno. Trees were what you played on in summer and cut up for firewood in winter; trees were why there was work for our father at the sawmill. Once, the local paper carried an item about California environmentalists hugging a live oak or some such; it was all the proof anyone needed that California environmentalists were out of their minds.

In fact--if you’ll permit just a bit more preface--trees were not only taken for granted, but actually got on people’s nerves. They shed leaves. Their sap was sticky. They weren’t like the trees you saw on TV or read about in poetry, perfectly shaped and swaying with inspiration. They were irregular and in-your-face and life-infested. Once, upon reading a Robert Frost poem for a sixth-grade English assignment, I strode forth loftily to become a “swinger of birches” and wound up flinging a nest of terrified tent caterpillars onto my head.

So let’s just say trees have never automatically tugged at these heartstrings, particularly not pine trees, which were so ordinary that kids had pine cone fights back home. Then came last week, when, stopping by the mall on a sunny lunch hour, we came upon a crowd of Orange County shoppers standing stock-still, their heads thrown back as if someone had just shouted, “Hey! Skywriting!” Curious, we shielded our eyes. And looked up.

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And up. It towered for 110 feet above us, taller than Bloomingdale’s, taller than telephone poles. Every year for the past several years--which in Southern California qualifies as a “time- honored tradition”--Newport Beach’s Fashion Island has erected the biggest, whoppingest, Christmas tree in the nation. But--as with so much of the region’s bounty, from the Crystal Cathedral to Angelyne’s cleavage--we’d never gotten around to actually seeing it up close.

Now here it was. Taller than the tree at Rockefeller Center. Taller than the tree at the White House. Taller (by God) than the tree down the road at South Coast Plaza. Taller than the tree at Disneyland. Seventeen thousand pounds of white fir at a price estimated in the tens of thousands of dollars, shipped--according to the big red-and-white placard beside it--”from a designated timber area near Mt. Shasta” and harvested “with no detrimental impact on the environment.”

If you tipped your head back, you could just barely see the point of the treetop, dark green against pale blue sky. The fragrance of pine was overwhelming. The tree was enormous, a King Kong of foliage, yet so perfectly shaped that we felt compelled to thrust our arms into its boughs to feel whether that was real bark on the trunk. It was. As our hands ran over its roughness, the tree shed needles. Its sap was sticky. We imagined the stump it had left, raw and massive and splintered, “near Mt. Shasta.” “How old do you think this tree was when they killed it?” my husband, a native Angeleno, quietly said.

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Old, as it turned out, though not in tree years. This was not virgin timber. White fir grows quickly. It was probably my father’s age. No reason to be sentimental. The tree came from a forest that was earmarked for logging, back a dirt road far from scenic routes and untraversed by tourists. It wasn’t even naturally perfect--its bare spots had been plugged with pieces of other white fir trees.

No reason to be sentimental. Not even the tree-huggers I telephoned later saw the behemoth’s captivity as much more than a venial sin. It would have been ground up for plywood, had it not become a magnet for Christmas shoppers. The business that had cut, shipped and erected it was run by a hard-working local family.

Nope, no reason to be sentimental. And yet, something in the feel of that tree trunk--in the sharp smell of raw timber, in the give of the thick, brown-black bark--something in the tree’s towering, forlorn presence was so moving. So wrong. Once there had been a tree, rising unseen in a far-off forest, its imperfections and magnificence invisible to any universe but its own.

Once there had been a thing of beauty far from people’s need to prove and sell things to each other. Now it stood like a circus elephant, tricked out in tinsel and yoked to concrete in the hopes that gawkers would come. Once this whole metropolis, so slathered now in ersatz Christmas, was a wild thing with no need to import the biggest just to feel big enough. Someone, a poet maybe, might have said the tree was a metaphor for Southern California, natural glory held captive to glued-on fakery. All I know is that it’s been hard to shake the smell of that dying white fir. Strange, how sentimental a person can get here about one real thing.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.