This year’s Christmas tree didn’t survive as long as those in years past. What we’ve discovered is that tying them to the roof of the car and careening for a couple of hours down the Taconic State Parkway — a trauma-inducing ride under any circumstances — isn’t good for the sprig’s psychological or physical health.
The journey for our upstate tree is typically much shorter and softer. Since our favorite tree farm lamentably closed —the purchase came with a free candy cane — we’ve been patronizing the Hawthorne Valley Farm Store in Ghent, NY. Their cut trees remained as robust as February approached as they did in December. Whether you should harbor a holiday tree almost until Valentine’s Day is a whole other discussion and one that, for the sake of family comity, I’m not prepared to have at the moment.
Unfortunately, we forgot to lop a couple of inches off its trunk before lowering it in our tree stand, it stubbornly refused to take water thereafter, and was shedding needles before New Year’s.
City trees get collected by the Department of Sanitation and are turned into mulch. In the country we’re responsible for their disposal with nature’s able assistance. After my wife removes the ornaments and lights and helps me drag the spruce out the door, typically sloshing leftover water and shedding waves of needles as it goes, it’s my job to free it from its stand and drag it into the woods.
There’s an informal Christmas tree graveyard about a hundred feet from the house where this year’s specimen got united with the decaying remnants of Christmas trees past. I counted six of them but there were undoubtedly many in more advanced states of decomposition buried beneath the snow. It’s a melancholy but reassuring ritual nonetheless.
As Dr. Seuss sagely wrote, “Today is done. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.” Knowing that the tree’s in good company, that it will eventually return to the soil and become fodder for new life, compensates for the letdown that the holiday season is over and we’re barreling into the dead of winter.
Discarded Christmas trees returning to the earth serves as a stark metaphor for one who suffers or perhaps benefits from a cosmically focused state of mind. The ritual feels increasingly poignant as the time grows shorter when I'll share our Christmas tree’s fate. I’m not obsessed by such thoughts, as some people my age seem to be. I frankly take comfort in eventually moving along to a different, possibly even cooler, state of being.
This conversation doesn't come out of the blue. It occurred with my friend Susan during one of those liminal days around New Year. We weren’t sitting around the fireplace nursing a glass of wine but cross-country skiing at Art Omi, a sculpture park, also in Ghent.
Susan brought up our eventual demise, but in the most cheerful manner. I’m not even sure what prompted it, though likely the leisurely — make that lethargic — pace at which we were traveling across the snow covered fields. The icy patches only marginally affected our progress. It was more that as much as we might like to deny it our bodies are catching up with us.
My friend merely stated that she’s become a student, an engaged observer, of her own decline. An athlete who skis, runs and plays tennis she nonetheless confessed that she’s noticed an incontestable dip in her abilities. I realize, however reluctantly, that I have, too, though both of us are reasonably well-preserved. Certainly enough to traverse a snow-blanketed sculpture park on planks. Then again we were stepping as much as skiing given the recognition that when you fall it’s not nearly as easy to return to the vertical as it once was.
My relative equanimity regarding the hereafter relates back to a profound experience I had in college — actually several, but one in particular at a moment when one is ripe for such experiences and the methods to achieve them were readily available. At that moment I told myself: you better ask all your questions now before this thing wears off.
So I asked about death and the answer I got was that death, in a sense, is a human distinction that nature doesn’t make. Birth, growth, decay, death and rebirth — albeit in a different configuration of molecules — is all part of the same process. Nature, God, or whatever you want to call that animating force, isn’t apart from us, but a part of us. Rather, we’re a part of it. It doesn’t flow around us. It flows through us. We and it are one and the same.
Language, even in the hands of a towering practitioner such as Shakespeare, only begins to scratch the surface. What we know, and even what AI will eventually know if and when it supersedes us, is but a fraction of the knowledge and wisdom out there. Humility is the only legitimate response.
We made our way backs to our cars without a single fall. As long as we cling to this mortal version of ourselves it felt good to get some exercise.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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