“Let’s go out in the woods and cut our own Christmas tree!”

December 1957, Eastham, Massachusetts. I was eleven. After years of two-week vacations on Cape Cod, which I’d always considered a magic summer kingdom, my parents and I had moved—to Cape Cod! We were just beginning our first winter there. So this Christmas was sure different from our holidays outside Boston in the cozy suburb of Auburndale, where we’d lived with my grandmother. Now we were living “in the country—so, from books I’d read, I thought cutting a Christmas tree was what you did.

To my surprise, though, my mother responded to my tree idea in a doubtful tone. “There’s not much around here except those little scrub pines, dear! And they’re not as pretty as spruces, like the Christmas trees you’re used to.”

It was Saturday morning, and we were sitting at the dining table having breakfast in the kitchen, which was peculiarly located at the front corner of the house, as though the room were the prow of our “ship.” On my side, the window looked out over bleached winter grass and our business sign.

Mommy, comfortable in her bathrobe, sat to my right and my father across from me. Through the front window behind him, I could see Rt. 6 and the occasional car blurring by.

“But if we look around, I bet we can find a really good tree, Mommy!”

She went on spreading marmalade on her toast.

“Sal, they’ll probably be very pitchy and sticky to work with,” my father said, in a more accommodating voice. Tapping ash off his cigarette in its holder, he took a swallow of coffee. In his old Pendleton shirt, Daddy looked across at me encouragingly; I didn’t notice how closely my blue-eyed gaze resembled his. Of course my freckled face was surrounded by long brown hair, unlike his exposed balding forehead.

“Oh, Daddy, let’s go and see what we can find anyway! Please? I’m all ready anytime!” I was in dungarees and sneakers, my usual Saturday morning outfit.

I must have argued successfully, for after some more discussion, once the dishes were done, Daddy and I threw on jackets and took off to find a tree. We hit the back roads, those tree-lined ribbons of gray pavement through the woods. Eastham was sparsely settled and we didn’t see a soul nor many houses that morning, either.

After a short drive, Daddy pulled over to the roadside. He’d brought along a small saw and an ax. The woods stretched ahead, a mix of gray, dark green, and a few rusty oak leaves clinging on. And there were plenty of pines out there! Leaves and needles carpeted the ground, and twigs and cones underfoot made a snapping sound as we walked.

Which one would make a good Christmas tree? A sapling, of course, though that word implies more grace than these pines offered. I loved them all anyway.
“How about this one, Daddy?”

“That’s a bit tall, Sal. . . let’s make it easy for you to reach when you decorate. After all, you’ve only got a thousand or two to choose from here!”

Stumbling a little, I plunged forward to where the pines appeared to grow more densely, where my eyes met up with a concentration of needle-on-needle deep green. Yet the closer I got, the more spaced apart the trees seemed. Also, each one was different from the next; this one leaned, that one had bent oddly, still another was straggly at the top. Daddy loyally trudged behind me, making occasional suggestions.

Finally, I decided. Oh, yes, here it is! This is the one. The tree I want to take home. It’s a moment which I know even now in commercial tree lots.

Daddy sawed it down, then I helped him lift it into the truck bed, and we drove off as quickly as we’d come. Except for that one cut-off trunk, nobody knew we’d been there.

Decorating, I soon realized that Mommy had been right. Daddy and I had chosen carefully but the little tree was bunchy at best. Scrub pines feature odd mixtures of bursts of needles (and not lavish bunches at that), and their bare, pencil-thin branches bend easily, also run anything but straight. I hung balls to fill in voids and tried to cover bare spaces. As for tinsel, I’d always hated prying apart those thin ribbons and this tree pushed my patience even further; luckily we also had tinsel garlands which I draped and festooned over the branches. I soon learned, too, that scrub pines are indeed pitchy and sticky! Daddy supplied a rag and some turpentine to wipe my hands, its garage-y smell mingling oddly with the scent of pine.

When I was done, the tree looked gay and bright, but was definitely a splotchy patchwork affair. I wish now that I had a snapshot but my parents were not home photo people.

Though I didn’t much think about it then, that Christmas must been a bit bleak for my family, especially my mother. They missed friends and longtime nearby neighbors; also Eastham was pretty austere in winter, as we were just beginning to find out.

But even with all its ungainliness and less-than-traditional look, the scrub pine tree was a joy, for me at least. Before then, Christmas had always just sort of “happened” to me, though always benignly. That day in Eastham, going out in the woods and choosing the exact tree was an independent act which I’d never have proposed before; my self-confidence had grown. Our move had set me up for a series of challenges: two weeks of sleep-away camp, meeting the new people who rented our cottages, swimming lessons and a pond to swim in all the time—and most of all, a new and very different style of school, where I’d done well. Though I didn’t assess these things in any orderly way that Saturday morning, all of them had had a maturing effect.

Unknowingly, then, I mirrored my parents’ independence. For in leaving Auburndale and the comfortable old house where she’d grown up, my mother had truly fled the nest. And after ten years of saving and planning, chafing at General Electric, feeling stifled and misused, my father had taken charge of his own life; now he was running his own business, with all the freedom, financial peril, and worry that would bring. And there we were, that first Cape Cod Christmas, a unit of three, in our own place. Running our own lives.

And I had chosen our Christmas tree.