Grown in Little Canada

I love Christmas trees. When I was a kid, we’d go to the farm and cut down a scratchy cedar tree and erect it in the never-used living room at my parents’ house. I love cedars. They smell so heavenly, which kind of makes up for their deadly pricks that leave sore scratch marks on your arms days after you’ve had a run-in with one. I loved the lights and the handmade ornaments my mom made after she got married, when they had exactly $0.00 in their bank account and had to rely on ornaments made of toilet paper rolls and tin foil.

Yesterday we went to the tree lot tucked behind the Farmer’s Market. I’ve decided that I love the Farmer’s Market, despite its tendency to be more of a wholesaler market than a true farmer’s market. It’s my type of place, which is, essentially, one filled with old people and hoop cheese. What can I say? I’m from rural North Carolina, after all.

We pulled up, parked, and … bought the first tree we saw. Yep, for all the tree love I have coursing through my veins, it never fails that we pull up to a stall, walk about five feet and find the perfect Frasier fir. We bought it from a man with the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen, who lives in Little Canada, a tiny community off the Tuckasegee River in Jackson County. Across North Carolina, there are an estimated 50 million of these trees on over 25,000 acres, and he and his wife have 14 acres of land filled with these trees. A couple of years ago the two put out 1,200 baby trees by hand. It took them three days. 

I imagine that they go to sleep and night and dream about trees. They have to watch for red spiders, which crawl in the little bitty buds at the tips of the limbs and make them explode. They have to use big, long machete-ish knives to sheer the trees into the perfect cones. They have to worry about drought and frosts. And that’s just until they get them to the market, where he’ll be until Christmas Eve, watching over the trees he’s selling there and trying, I imagine, to make a small profit. Years of work go into this season. The 12-foot trees (which we did not buy, by the way, because that would just be silly) take eight to nine years to grow. He said the drought we’ve had has slowed down their growth a bit, making them a little bit fatter rather than a little bit taller. Sometimes they think about going out and setting them all on fire, he laughed.

I understand this, the love-hate of the work you’ve chosen. It’s a fine, fine line, even for Christmas trees and even if, in the end, what you grow brings someone like me who stands talking in your forest of swinging trees, pulling at the leaves and smelling the piney scent on her hands and dreaming of lights.