Ten Decembers to Make a Christmas Tree

December begins in the dark. The gravel lot on the ridge is rimmed with frost at nine in the morning, the ruts from yesterday's cars frozen hard. Below, a valley holds a lake of fog. Across the hill, the rows run straight up the slope — a solid block of green, each tree built on a cone, each one a shape from a distance and a different personality up close.

This is a harvest worked in December, which sets it apart from everything else on the farm. Corn came in weeks ago. The pumpkins are gone. The only hands in the field are families — kids in puffy coats, a parent carrying a saw that somebody filed too sharp on purpose. They walk the rows slowly, peering at each tree the way a reader scans a shelf of novels, looking for the one that fits a known corner of the living room and won't embarrass the annual photograph.

A man stands at the open door of the shed, breath showing. He points to the far field where the firs ran fuller this year. He has been answering the same questions since the day after Thanksgiving, and he answers them again, because every family walking past him is about to cut down a tree that has been standing in this field for a very long time, and the least he can do is send them home with a good one.

The longest crop

The thing about Christmas trees is the wait. Corn is planted and cut in a single summer. An apple tree bears within a few years. A Christmas tree stands in the field for the better part of ten years, pruned and shaped every summer, losing some of its peers along the way to drought, to deer, to a double top that will never straighten out. The seedlings going in this spring are for a Christmas nearly a decade out. The farmer works toward a December he has to imagine.

All that time, the tree is working. It puts on a new layer of growth each year, and the shearing in high summer coaxes it into a dense, even cone. Left alone, a fir goes ragged and wild, with gaps and long bare branches — a tree, but not a Christmas tree. The shearing makes it a shape, almost a symbol. The farmer walks the rows in July with a blade, trimming the new growth so the tree thickens instead of shooting upward. In December he cuts it down in thirty seconds, and the whole ten-year project ends the way it began — with him standing over it in the cold.

The families don't think about the decade. They make their choice in twenty minutes, wrap a hand around the trunk, feel the resin stick to their palms. It is the one December ritual completed entirely outdoors, in the open air, with frost on the grass and something in the scent of every cut branch working on a part of the brain that predates memory.

The cut

The cut is quick, and lower than people expect. The saw bites through at the very base, leaving a flat disc of pale wood in the grass — a stump that by next fall will be hidden among the weeds and berry canes. Fresh resin goes sharp in the cold air. Then comes the machinery, because nobody these days drives home with a raw, shedding tree.

Behind the shed sits the shaking machine. It grips the trunk in a rubber collar and rattles the whole tree until everything dead falls out of it — a gray flour of old needles, a dusting of dry leaves, the mossy bits of last summer's bird nests. Then the netter spins it in green netting, bottom to top, compressing the tree until what arrived as a six-foot fir goes out as a long green spear, thin as a broom, easy to carry and easy to tie down. The whole operation takes about a minute. The tree that took ten years to grow leaves the farm in sixty seconds.

The tree that took ten years to grow leaves the farm in sixty seconds.

Some of these trees go no farther than the lot at the end of the dirt road. Others are loaded onto trailers with frames like giant wire cages, the trees packed head-first and tight, so the whole load reads as one solid green block. Those rigs roll at dusk, down out of the hills toward the flat, warm parts of the map — places that cannot grow a mountain fir, cannot give it the cold it needs, but can absolutely sell one. The driver unhooks onto bare asphalt, the lot men stack the wire racks, and the tree finishes its life not in the field it grew in but in a corner of some city block, under a half-frozen light, waiting for a family to carry it the last few blocks home.

What's left in the field

By the week before Christmas, the back field is a study in subtraction. The rows stand empty, full of sawn stumps the width of coffee cans, pale and raw against the week-old snow. The gravel lot sees fewer cars each day. The man who runs the farm passes the short afternoons turning the unsold trees into wreaths and bundles of garland, or doing the quiet arithmetic of what the year gave him.

It is quiet in a way that no other season is. The fields that roared with mowers and shearing crews in June are now just stumps and the ragged last row, and the sound from the shed is the slow snip of scissors on wire. The families are at home by now, hacksawing the base of their spear so the tree can drink. A fresh cut tree drinks a surprising amount of water in the first week — more than the stand can hold, some years. In warm living rooms across the flat country, mountain trees are drinking and shedding and slowly drying, each one the center of its own December.

On Christmas Eve, the lots in town shut at whatever hour the last customer leaves. The unsold trees go to mulch or to whoever wants them. The wire cages on the trailers stand empty in the freezing dark. Up on the ridge, frost settles into the cut rows, and the sawn stumps whiten.

Under that frost is the next crop, already half started. The seedlings that went in last spring barely clear the weeds — a few inches of dark green in the gloom, nothing to look at. They will be sheared, and lost to the deer, and rescued again. And a decade of Decembers from now, a family will walk this same row, and one of them will stop, and somebody will say that one, and the saw will come back out. The man who planted them will probably not be the man who cuts them, and that is the other thing Christmas trees have over every other crop — they outlive the plan.