It's Christmastime here in sunny wine country California where snow is exclusively an outdoor sport for people who can afford ski lift tickets and gasoline. Now it is a week and a half before Christmas, we are throwing a small party for the neighbors tomorrow and a Christmas tree is imperative. With appropriate trepidation off we go to find the perfect Christmas tree.
Now anyone with a bah-humbug attitude and certainly anyone who has to live with someone like me knows that the word "perfect" applied to a Christmas tree is likely to start a disastrous trek among endless malls, home improvement stores and sundry other big boxes. The traffic is snarling, the sky is gray and just the concept of buying such trivia as a Christmas tree in the midst of this global economic crash could be seen as treasonous. How could anything go right?
In my head I roll the clock back more than half a century but everything goes blank. My father was driving a Hudson and my mother would take me by the hand to go to the corner fountain where what looked like an ancient man named Jimmy was the soda jerk. From there directly across a huge boulevard was the butcher shop where mom would buy a chicken for dinner. I remember that the chickens were running around in a cage and my mother would select one and point out the bird to the butcher. They had some strange conversation that didn't make sense or I can't remember. Maybe that was the perfect chicken but it soon met it's fate taking it's last two or three cocksure steps without a head. Butcher shops earned their name back then.
And maybe I'm not quite getting that memory right at this age but what I do know is that I grew up in a Jewish family in Los Angeles and therefore what could I possibly know about a 'perfect' Christmas tree today? But age brings along some insight and moments of clear headed thinking so using my time-honed skills I start by asking what I think is the cleverest question: Where do we get the cheapest tree?
Oh oh. Here is Mr. Perfectionist on the sure wrong track head-on collision with being self righteously cheap. I'm the guy that takes half of the stuff I buy at the low priced big box stores (I know you know which ones I mean. No need to name names.) back because they are of such cheap import quality. I even took back a loaf of bread to the grocer the other day because it was stale. The nerve of them to sell stale bread. (I won't even tell you how much I pay for bread because then you will know my cheaper-is-better rant is a pure con.)
So now the wise know-it-all culturally out of it Christmas tree shopper has to check out six stores, half of which don't even carry Christmas trees, before getting to the right selection in what must be the right store because the trees are now 25% off. What could be bad about that? And sure enough, after scrounging around among the left overs of the past weekend's buying mania, there is a perfect tree; it is symmetrical, the needles are plump and moist, it isn't too tall and it even has a very top stem for the beloved tip-top crown of the tree ornament.
And like the chicken in the cage, the outside garden clerk agrees that this is the perfect tree and carries it off to the slaughter table which is a sheet of plywood standing on a makeshift pile of cement blocks where some other clerk with the right slaughter training chops off the bottom with an electric chainsaw and then, rather than being plucked, the bushy, proudly spreading tree is dragged with a heartless yank through a hoop that compresses its branches and at the same time shackles it into a plastic netting to make it ride just perfectly on the rooftop car rack where the hip set carries there skis.
Mission accomplished. The perfect tree perfectly mangled to car top perfection.
Now off to the next assignment: Having a perfectly Merry Christmas.
