In Robert Frost’s poem, Christmas Trees, a stranger from the city visits the poet’s farm near Ripton, Vermont, not to talk poetry, but to buy Christmas trees. Frost had never thought of his forested hills as being groved in Christmas trees, nor had he thought of the potential cash to be made by harvesting these trees, so against his instincts he allows the fellow from the city walk his hills and put his trees to “the trial by market everything must come to.” After careful consideration Frost realizes that his acreage is furnished with fine festive trees – “Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools/Could hang enough on to pick off enough.” The man from the city estimates that he could harvest about a thousand marketable trees. “A thousand Christmas trees! – at what apiece?” Frost asks.
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars,” the city man replies. Frost quickly does the math – thirty dollars for a thousand trees is three cents a tree – the price of a postage stamp when the poem was written. He realizes that no amount of money – at least none close to that offered, would be worth denuding his lovely hills. The only offering equal to the real value of the trees would be if he could give one each to his friends. So he spends three cents a piece for the stamps required to send not a tree, but his poem to them.
In Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory, he writes about one Christmas when he and Sook, the elderly cousin that raised him, tramp miles into the woods outside Monroeville, Alabama to find the perfect Christmas tree, which is so sturdy it requires 30 whacks with the axe to fell. As the old lady and the little boy haul the tree back home through town “with the strength of triumphant huntsmen,” people admire their tree and offer to buy it. They turn aside all offers, but the mill owner’s wife won’t take “no” for an answer – she offers as much as 50 cents – which is big money considering the postage stamp price per tree Robert Frost was offered at about the same time. But they won’t even take a dollar for it. “Goodness, woman,” the mill owner’s wife complains, “you can get another one.” “I doubt it,” his usually shy cousin replies in defiance, “There’s never two of anything.”
This is the time of year when I remind us all (and don’t we need reminding?) that: A) Jesus most definitely was not born in December, or in the winter at all, but almost certainly in the Spring: B)The New Testament never authorizes, nor encourages (nor does it prohibit) the observance of a special day honoring Jesus’ birth; and C) Christmas is celebrated in December, not for any Biblical reasons, but to syncretize a whole host of Saturnalia and Winter Solstice rituals – which is why it has always been about consumption as much as anything else. Oh, and D) Bah-humbug.
The fact of this time of year, as the sun reasserts itself here, in the Northern Hemisphere, is that emotions and impulses intensify. We spend too much, eat too much, feel too much, sleep too little, pray too little, think too little. We get so angry at the traffic, and that the Wii gaming system we got the great deal on will not be delivered by 12-24, and then the bank of televisions against the back wall at Best Buy is filled with Ralphie firing his Red Rider BB Gun for the first time, and we laugh deep, cleansing belly laughs – or better yet, it is filled with Jimmy Stewart praying on the bridge outside Bedford Falls when the first flakes of snow start to fall, and we suppress the deep-cleansing tears welling up. The next second we will be angry again. The switch that flips between Seething and Sentimentality is hair-triggered. What is lost in all this is sense, kindness, an awareness of the true value of things, peace and good will.
And so may I encourage us all (myself particularly) to “Let (our) moderation be known to all (Philippians 4.5), to be anxious for nothing (Philippians 4.6), to employ our gifts in the service of others (I Peter 4.10), and to treat others as we wish to be treated (Matthew 7.12) – that we all take a deep breath and remember who we are.
Which is another way of encouraging ourselves to remember the value of things truly valuable – our Christian witness, our own souls, each other. It might have been tempting, during the depression, to sell your evergreens for three cents apiece, even more so to sell one fine tree for a whole dollar – but it would have been wrong. “Why do you spend your wages for what does not satisfy,” God asks in Isaiah (55.2), to which I would add, “Why do we spend our good will on what does not gratify?”
