A small Christmas story
Dec. 8, 2010—
I like to think I know a little about a lot of things, but I had never seen a real live tiny Christmas tree.
I mean, a three-foot North Carolina Fraser Fir with real needles. You put a cup of water in a tree stand and everything.
The orange ribbon on one of about seven branches says it is a “Tabletop Tree.” It seems this tree is for someone in a transient apartment or prison.
I do live alone and over the weekend forked over $20 for one of these lame trees. No one could stop me. I’ve seen three-foot tall artifical trees, but not real ones.
What’s next? Live micro-palm trees?
I recently decorated my Christmas tree. It took about three minutes. One string of lights hang like a melting icicle over the tabletop.
Sometimes this tree cracks me up. Other times it makes me wonder what happened to all my “Leave it to Beaver” life visions.
Over the past several years I’ve loaded up the car with Charles Brown holiday CDs and drove out with a significant other from Chicago to chop down a Christmas tree at Sinnissippi Forest in Oregon, Ill. I loved embarrasing my date by asking her to sit on Santa’s lap while Mrs. Claus gave me a “Why don’t you grow up?” stare. Sinnissippi closed last year after a 61-year-run. They told me that business had been down. Well, I had never chopped down a three-foot tree there.
Maybe that was the problem.
And this year I’m not in a relationship that demands the commitment to find a new forest—from the trees.
So here I am with my first ever “Tabletop Tree.”
I couldn’t figure out how these dinky trees are grown. The ribbon had a phone number for the Carolina Fraser Fir Company on Potato Creek Road in Mouth of Wilson, Va.
Their address is bigger than my tree.
Inventory manager Greg Goodman answered the phone. His company’s 500-acre farm is on the Virginia-North Carolina border. “There’s a little place in the field where we grow all the tabletop trees together—just for that purpose,” Goodman explained in a deep Southern drawl. “Most six, seven foot trees are set five feet apart in the field. These are probably set two feet apart, knowing we’re going to trim them when they’re smaller.”
Great. Just the way Maria cuts my hair.
“We plant a crop yearly with the intent of harvesting that crop 10 years down the road,” he said.
Goodman figured my tree was harvested in mid-November. You could transport these trees to Chicago in a car instead of a truck, so it is a green initiative.
Goodman said my little tree was already about eight to 10 years old. He explained, “Its about five years from seed before you set them out in the field. An eight foot tree is 15 years old.”
The root system is cut off so I can’t replant my tree to make it a bigger, more normal looking Christmas tree.
Should all this make me sad?
“No, that’s what its grown for,” Goodman answered. “The market for tabletop trees goes up every year. (Are you thinking TeenyTableTopTree ornaments?) Maybe more people living in apartments are able to use them. A lot of cities that didn’t allow live trees in apartments are now letting in live trees. There’s not much of a chance of one of them catching on fire before Christmas if they’re kept watered.”
And if they do catch on fire, a glass of water will do the trick.
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