There is always trouble with the Christmas tree in this family.
Most obvious, and perennial, is the issue of our Christmas tree’s appearance: As I’ve mentioned in columns in previous Decembers — three years, or is it four, since I started writing The Shipwreck Rose? — we usually, but not always, hew to the white pine, our local evergreen, out of tradition. We went back to the white pine again this year, more from fiscal necessity than preference.
Back when the families of the village all owned woodlots, extending from Main Street in a northwesterly direction all the way into the dark, soft pine forest of Northwest Woods, it was normal to cut and decorate a white pine for the holiday tree. I know this is so, and not just something made up by my father or some other storytelling antecedent who enjoyed the game of convincing children of things that weren’t true but were amusing, because I have closely examined a particular antique glass-plate negative in the archive of The Star that shows an East Hampton family at Christmas, and the sad tree of the 1880s, drooping in the corner under its burden of cranberry garlands and blown-glass balls, is indisputably a white pine.
Now that Northwest Woods almost is no longer — has almost become a ghost woods, a name for a neighborhood where once something grew but now no longer does, like St. John’s Wood in London — we might feel a bit more sorry for the white pine, and sentimental about the white pine, than we did in my childhood, when the white pine was more or less just a disgrace, no matter how hard my parents tried to instill pride that our eccentric Christmas tree was a charming local tradition. It’s a poignant pine, the white pine. It does droop so. The white pine feels sorry for itself, with its pin-thin limbs and such fine, spare needles, in comparison with the lush Fraser fir, which preens there plump and rich each Christmas, brushing its luxurious locks and flashing its gold bangles. If the white pine were a person, it would have big, soft watery blue eyes.
Anyway, the problem with the white pine when I was a kid was that it was pathetic looking and had barely enough strength to bear up under the ornaments. It was recognized among my childhood cohort as the Rattrays’ eccentric “Charlie Brown” tree. We all know someone for whom Christmas is an annual excuse for an extravagant demonstration of self-pity, and, in our household, that someone is usually (but not exclusively) the white pine. No one likes a sad sack.
The white pine gave us trouble in the woods, reliably, every year.
We used to go back to what we called “the Huntting woodlots,” which were many acres — I’m not sure how many, but many — belonging to my great-grandmother Florence Huntting and her siblings, Minnie (the relative notorious for throwing her apron over her head in anguish when her cookies didn’t come out exactly right) and Dan (the relative notorious for dressing up like a cowboy and keeping horses behind the white house opposite the Presbyterian Church). The Huntting woodlots were off Bull Path and remained, at least a patch of it, in the family until the mid-1990s. One time, at about the age of maybe 11, I got frostbitten toes as I stamped stubbornly through the woods refusing — for a very long hour, as the mercury dropped and dropped — to agree to anyone else’s choice of Christmas tree: it was never full enough or symmetrical enough. I was wearing green rubber boots that day, the loose, ugly, army-green kind people wore in the 1970s, not the English hunter-jumper kind that became fashionable 30 years later, and when I peeled off my wet socks back home on Edwards Lane, my toes were wax-white. I poked my toe with a sewing needle to see if I could feel anything, and I could not. To this day if I am wearing the wrong footwear on a cold winter day, two particular toes on my right foot tingle and go numb and white.
Another time, the trouble was that we actually lost a member of our tree-chopping party in the woods. We never went that deep or far, but there are gentle hills back there off Bull Path, just high enough to disappear behind, and we strayed from one another as we headed in different directions, drawn by the misty winter chimera of the perfect tree, and a small member of our party was lost sight of and misplaced. Was it Jenny Paxton? Or was it Daisy Dohanos who got lost in the woods? I feel whichever friend it was will be disappointed in me, that I cannot remember who. All that remains is the fact that a friend was missing for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and, quite reasonably, this small person felt very sad about it.
This weekend, with our latest white pine, the trouble was purely aesthetic in nature. No toes or children were lost. My own son and daughter are no longer young enough to become genuinely emotionally distraught about the exact perfection, or imperfection, of another family member’s taste in Christmas evergreens, but the tree that was brought back from the woods on Sunday set my teenage daughter to wailing nevertheless. Okay, they weren’t real tears, only mock tears, but she loudly let us know she really didn’t like it. What a disappointment it was. The tree was emblematic of all the trouble we’ve had over the last year or two, all the trials and tribulations that are improving our character so, issues with affluence and employment, as well as, more significantly, the sparseness, numerically, of the faces (breaking crackers, making noise, and wearing paper crowns) and of felicity around winter’s holiday tables. She wasn’t wrong. It’s patently obvious that the white pine is the tree of austerity, and no one loves austerity at Christmas except a Massachusetts Puritan, and our people left Massachusetts in 1646 to come to Long Island because that wasn’t our vibe.
But instead of joining in the wailing and tree-blaming, for once, I had to actually chuckle about the trouble with the tree; it was that sad, this one. It didn’t have any limbs at all at the midsection, but was naked from knees to shoulder. We stood it in the corner of the music room, in the usual spot, in the usual antique pottery crock, the slender trunk stuck down in the usual gallon of beach pebbles, and considered what was to be done to make it look happier.
Our first thought was to attempt, ludicrously, to augment the tree’s girth by tying extra branches (which had been cut off from the bottom because it was too tall and left a sap mark on the white-plaster ceiling) back on at the middle with floral wire. You can imagine how well that worked. Next, a family member offered to drive back out into the woods as the sun set to fetch a second tree, which he did, and when he came back we stood it up next to the first one in the crock and strapped the two trees together snugly with floral wire. It looks really good. It’s the fullest and nicest white pine of all the generations. You’d never know it’s been tampered with or that there’s been surgery.
It wasn’t until Monday afternoon that, rushing out to the Honda to get to the post office before dark, I noticed that the car had been left in gear by the second-tree fetcher, and the battery had died. It wouldn’t be a tree hunt without trouble. I cannot say why, but it’s true.