Throwback Thursday: A Christmas Story — and a Christmas Offer!

I breathe deeply to catch the branch’s scent through the mist but the flat, wet air yields nothing but the reek of teenage bodies and wet concrete.  The teens bicker, one so close his bright blue jacket keeps brushing against my arm. His jacket is dripping wet like everything else in this mist — too light to be called a rain, too pervasive to be ignored.  The teenagers have been here all morning, I overhear, and someone didn’t bring enough beer.  Luckily for Rob and me, because of his disability we were moved to the front and didn’t have to wait all day for an unobstructed view of Buckingham Palace and the branch.  We had enough time to drink before we came.  I move closer to the fence surrounding the palace, attempting to ignore the frenetic sounds of youth beside us.

Rob and I haven’t celebrated Christmas in more than a decade, though we’re not here for the holiday.  We’re here for the branch.  Perhaps this one will deserve the name tree.  My least favorite holiday, I hate the pressure of buying Christmas presents and the forced socialization, the honouring of a creator’s son who has most definitely abandoned creation.  The last time Rob and I celebrated Christmas I got so drunk on eggnog and wine Rob had to drag me out of the party before I embarrassed us.  Or him, at least; I certainly don’t remember enough for embarrassment.  That happened before Rob needed the wheelchair, before we’d ever heard of Lambert-Eaton myasthenic syndrome.

Centred in front of the palace and framed by two grey-uniformed guards, a dozen spotlights illuminate the covered branch and the huge red tarp with the smiling face of Father Christmas that hides it until the big reveal. “A great achievement for humanity,” the newscaster had said.  “A Christmas branch that looks and even smells like the real thing!” 

The smelling part had made me want to come.  Branches smelled like metal and rust and purified air, not like the tree from my childhood.  They did their job by converting carbon dioxide into breathable air, but they could not be mistaken for real.  The tree I grew up with had been beautiful in a way that transcended anything man-made.

The oak had grown in the green of a churchyard in the small Maryland town where I grew up.  Not in artificial turf, but real, verdant grass.  As tall as the church, the oak had huge knots and crevices that my eager young fingers would use as leverage to climb into its leafy arms, though never too high.  The church allowed occasional climbing — the connection between person and nature was considered sacred.  Its scent was bitter and sweet at the same time.  Every Sunday the townspeople gathered around the tree to sing hymns, holding hands and worshipping, with the tree at the center of our circle and our prayers.

First the grass around the tree began to die.  I noticed it on a soft spring day toward the end of eighth grade, while working on a nature drawing for art class.  A patch of grass had turned brown.  The town held prayer meetings surrounding the tree until the botanists came with their chemical sprays.  Then we had to move inside the church to pray, though the chemicals still made many of us ill; we did not have the masks the botanists had.  They did try to get us to leave the church, but we couldn’t abandon the tree.  The death spread despite our prayers and their chemicals.  Soon all the grass had withered and yellowed, and then the oak’s leaves, which had been bright and green with the onset of spring, turned brown and began to fall as if autumn had arrived.

The tree had died by my fifteenth birthday.  The town still met for worship on the now deadened ground outside the church, to pray for earth’s renewal through God’s forgiveness; but with the tree gone the prayers seemed empty.  I moved away as soon as I could, the smell of bark still with me.

I look down at Rob but cannot read his face as he gazes at the covered branch, perhaps trying to catch its scent in the breezeless night as I am.  His lined face reminds me of my oak’s bark, though my memory sees him as younger, still smooth-skinned and happy.  He has spent his entire life dedicated to tree lore, studying their history, contributing to studies on earth renewal and regrowth.  Once he heard that a forest had been found in Tunisia and had raced off to see it, only to find it burned to the ground in a civil war.  I wish I had gone with him; I regret not doing so to this day, for he was changed when he came home to me, hollow in a way I could not fill.

I met Rob after a presentation I did in graduate school on the artistry of trees, discussing whether art could exist within humans when it no longer existed within nature.  I began with a remembrance of my oak and, after the presentation, Rob sought me out.  He was majoring in the botany of extinction with trees as his focus, and our ideas ran parallel, though he had never seen a real tree before.  The night ended with him in my arms as I traced the crevices of my oak against his bare back.  We married shortly after graduating, forty-eight years ago.

As the clock strikes midnight proclaiming Christmas Day and church bells ring dimly from St. Paul’s Cathedral, a spotlight moves to the balcony where Queen Victoria II appears with two guards.  Wearing a sparkling red gown with her brown hair gleaming across her shoulders, the queen waves and the crowd erupts into cheering. The teenager with wet sleeves beside me smiles hugely, his barely stubbled face turning pink.  While beautiful and young — not yet twenty — and beloved by her people, I feel nothing for the queen but regret.  The crowd continues to cheer as she raises both hands and lets them fall, the covering over the branch rising from an unseen cord, prompted by her motions.

First a bright red stand appears as the covering lifts from the branch, gathered by the two guards on the balcony with the Queen.  Then the bottom branches, the dark green needles made to look like real pine needles, until finally the guards pull the entire covering off to reveal the very tip of the lush branch.  It’s such a complex and tangible green, almost like a real tree.  Nothing like the sculpted metal metaphors of the first branches.

I squeeze Rob’s shoulder as a line of children dressed in red and white file into the courtyard surrounding the branch, six on one side and six on the other.  With stern and unsmiling faces, they carry silver baskets, intent on carrying out their duty.

A guard brings out a ladder and the children begin to decorate the branch, pulling swathes of garland, candy canes, and sparkling, gleaming balls from their baskets.  The Queen waves at the crowd as the children decorate the tree, the crowd’s adulation vibrating in my ears and the teenagers beside me leaping and pounding one another’s shoulders and backs.

I first saw branches when Rob and I, with some friends from graduate school, took a road trip during spring break to see the Sherwood Forest Project.  Green Man Incorporated had just finished the project, though similar forests had already been built in Germany and China.  Now every home has at least one branch, but at that time they were new, revolutionary.  Named defribulizers by their makers, no one ever called them that.  People in England and the United States called them branches, in Mexico pedunculo, in France bois.  Every country had their own name, yet no one wanted to call them what they were meant to replace. Trees.