O Christmas tree: Drought, theft, wine, and barbed wire | Mark Hinson

Picking out a Christmas tree is usually a no-brainer.

Run to Whole Foods. Find a tabletop-size tree. Bring it home. Mix spiked eggnog and play “A Charlie Brown Christmas” album while my wife Amy decorates the Tannenbaum. A holiday tradition, of sorts. More nog before the cats gnaw on the branches and barf all over the floor?

This December, it was not so easy. Because of a raging drought out West, rising fuel costs and the high price of fertilizer, there were no trees left at Whole Foods two weeks before Christmas. None at Publix, nor Fresh Market. The internet kept pointing me towards a Big Box Store with repellent politics, so I passed.

Finally, I found a suitable tree (for more money, of course) at an independent nursery, which did not have much to offer.

Getting in the Christmas spirit is tricky this year.

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Down on the farm

I grew up on a farm outside Marianna, so my family cut down a cedar every December and dragged the fire hazard inside our ranch-style house. Given the old-school electric bulbs we loaded on the limbs of the cedar, how my three older brothers and I didn’t burn to death in our sleep is a real Christmas miracle.

When I was 12, my mother gave me and my older brother Robert, 18, the job of finding and cutting down a Christmas tree. We were going to be outside dove hunting on a Saturday afternoon, so why not shoot dinner and get in the holiday swing of things. We headed to farmland south of our main spread to get some killing and Christmas done.

Secretly, I really wanted to drive Robert’s spiffy Nova SS because I was obsessed with driving at that age. The birds kept landing on the opposite side of the field so Robert came up with a bright idea. He would sit on the hood of the car with his loaded double-barrel shotgun, and I would drive. The wheels of the Nova would flush the doves off the ground and Robert would shoot them in flight. All I heard was, “You get to drive.”

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Fall down and go boom

The hunting approach sort of worked for a while but ran into a major glitch when it came time to drive across a public dirt road into the next field. As I approached the exit at a fast rate of speed, it dawned on me that I needed to stop and look both ways. I slammed on the brakes. Robert, in a seated position, went flying off the hood.

He landed on his butt in the middle of the road with the shotgun pointed up. Both barrels boomed when he hit. Thank God there were no cars coming.

Instead of beating me into a pulp, Robert’s usual reaction, my brother laughed and laughed. We bonded over the blunder, but we forgot to chop down a tree. As the sun set in the December sky, he drove to a convenience store out in the country. He told me to get behind the steering wheel while he went inside to pay for a bag of ice from the freezer outdoors.

When Robert emerged from the store, he grabbed a bag of ice as well as one of the pre-cut fir Christmas trees out front.

“Go, go, go,” he said when he jumped in the passenger seat, and I took off into the night. I quickly realized I was driving the get-away car with a stolen Christmas tree in the trunk of the Nova.

Yeah, I’m not proud of it either.

“This tree looks store-bought,” my mother said when we returned home.

“We didn’t pay anything for it,” I said and felt a deep sense of shame.

I may have started the War on Christmas.

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Needs more tinsel

A few years later, we gave up Christmas-tree lights because my family had moved into a two-story house built in 1905 with wood floors that were basically kindling. The size of the cedars doubled. So did the ornaments and decorations.

One December during college break, I dragged home a monster cedar that dwarfed the staircase and nearly went to the second floor past the 14-foot ceiling. My mother and I decided to decorate the giant tree after a wine-soaked dinner. In those days, my mom still imbibed even though one glass of vino made her loopy. We were well past one glass when she and I attacked the cedar in a holiday frenzy.

There is an art to decorating a tree. The ornaments should be spaced out and have a certain symmetry to them. Reflecting strands of tinsel are a nice touch but should be used sparingly. My mother, Robert Mondavi, and I did none of that.

The next morning, it looked like a flock of angels had sneezed all over our tree.

Can’t fake it

Not long after I married Amy in the mid-1990s, I found the perfect Christmas tree at LeMoyne art gallery during the annual holiday sale. It was a tabletop Tannenbaum made completely out of barbed wire. We shared our townhouse with two horrible Himalayan cats at the time, so I am sure I was trying to get back at the tree-mangling felines. Plus, it would be forever.

I called Amy and told her I was going to buy a barbed wire Christmas tree.

“Oh, no you’re not,” came her response.

That’s when I found out I had married a purist. Live trees only. She was just like my old man, who used to scoff at my aunt’s sparkly aluminum fake tree. The revolving light wheel of different colors my aunt placed in front of the permanent Tannenbaum put him over the top. He is the real reason I chopped down a cedar every year.

“Christmas trees should not require assembly and go back in the closet each year,” my father once told me.

Guess I will visit Whole Foods earlier next year.

Mark Hinson is a former senior writer at The Tallahassee Democrat. He can be reached at mark.hinson59@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: O Christmas tree: Drought, theft, wine, barbed wire and cedar