O Christmas Tree The hunt for the perfect fir is a holiday ritual

My wife and I are not allowed to go cut down the Christmas tree anymore.

Our kids won’t let us. Our efforts have embarrassed them one too many times.

I shall miss the annual hunt. As a transplant to Maine, the search for the perfect tree has been one of the rural traditions I have enjoyed over the years.

I grew up in a big city in New Jersey, where the search for a tree was very different. It involved a long tramp in the cold, scouring the city’s street corners, vacant lots and back alleys in search of a real tree that did not cost an arm and a leg. (In some sections of the city, you really could lose an arm or a leg while searching for a tree, or just a quart of milk.)

Maine, however, was the great outdoors. Theoretically, it offered all the possibilities you see in the holiday commercials: clean, fresh air, families singing carols as they walk easily through untouched fields of snow, where a large, full, symmetrical fir tree just waited to be taken back to someone’s living room. In commercials, everyone smiles and the temperature is ideal, with just a holiday nip in the air and soft flurries falling lightly. In reality, it’s always just plain cold – just as it was during one of my first forages for a tree in Maine. It was 1976 and we were living in Greenville. My parents had come up from New Jersey for the holidays, and to see what winter was like in Maine. My dad was getting ready to retire and they were considering a move to my adopted state.

Greenville in the winter adds a new understanding of what cold really is. It’s the kind of cold that sinks deep into your bones and stays there until the ice is out on Moosehead Lake. As we headed out to a friend’s woodlot, the temperature had dipped below zero. There was a breeze blowing off the lake.

We walked through the woods, the frozen snow crunching under our boots, the gray sky stiff and sullen overhead. No one sang. We found a tree. It was lovely. I shouldered the ax. Dad and the womenfolk stood back, shivering. I took aim. The handle swung in a wide arc as the head of the ax separated and flew in its own arc into a snowbank 15 feet away.

Disheartened but determined, we found the ax head, repaired the offending instrument and hacked down the tree. We shoved it into the trunk of our ’68 Plymouth and took it home. It wouldn’t fit through the front door, so we hacked away some more until we could get it inside and stand it up.

(That was the same year we set the oven at the wrong temperature and, after three hours of cooking, the bird was still frozen inside. By the way, a year or so later, mom and dad moved to Florida. Mom claims it was the energy crisis that scared them away from Maine, but I think dad just wanted to thaw out his toes.)

There have been other trees over the years. There was the year that, stymied in our search for a nice fir tree, we brought home a spruce tree. It was full and symmetrical as a Christmas tree should be, but it was difficult to decorate. Unlike the soft, pliable needles of the fir, the spruce needles were stiff and the kids and the adults complained as we were punctured each time we set an ornament.

Several days later, we discovered that the tree was what is known locally as a skunk spruce. And it’s not called that because of the stripes. The house was filled with a strong pungent odor that did not engender holiday feelings in anyone.

We burned a lot of scented candles that year.

But the clincher came a few years ago. My wife and I headed into our woodlot for the traditional tree hunt. In keeping with tradition, we were foiled in finding the perfect tree until we came upon a tall fir whose top appeared, high above our heads, to have the elusive shape and fullness we sought.

We cut the tree down, sawed it off at the right spot and stood it up. Stunned silence. What had appeared in the treetops to be the perfect tree in reality was a grotesque caricature with large gaping spaces where branches were supposed to be. It was getting dark. It was Christmas Eve. We needed that tree.

So we did the only thing we could think of, we hauled the monstrosity back to the house, along with some extra branches. I took out my electric drill and drilled holes at strategic points on the trunk of our tree. Into each hole, we placed a healthy dollop of super glue and stuck in one of the extra branches, eventually filling the gaps and creating, we thought, a fine Christmas tree. We anchored the implanted branches with wreathing wire and called it good. With ornaments in place, you couldn’t tell that tree had been bio-engineered in any way.

But the kids had watched the process, along with a few of their friends, and were mortified.

“We’re never going to let you get the tree again,” they said.

And they meant it.