Christmas Trees
By James Lileks

I never know if I have the right Christmas tree. You get them home, the branches relax, and you notice huge gaping holes, as though the tree had been in a bitter fight with a nasty larch back in the forest.

But you have to choose. I grabbed the trunk - which feels like plunging your hand into a bucket of hypodermic needles - and dragged it to the check-out attendant. He was a burly Santa-clone, his beard and eyebrows flecked with woodchips, a chainsaw muttering in his hand like a dog that wants permission to sic.

"Is that your tree?" he grinned. Meaning, what? Have we bonded? Formed some precious flora-fauna link? Or does he mean something else? Perhaps this is the lot where people claim stolen trees recovered by the police. Maybe I'll have to produce a tree license, or a picture of myself and the tree in happier times.

"It's going to be my tree," I said slowly, "after I buy it."

"Right! You going to put it up today?"

I nodded. Last year I bought a tree and had it wrapped in plastic netting, and for some reason it was a few days before we got around to putting it up. After 72 hours in plastic on the porch, the tree had gotten stuck; even after the wrapping was off, it looked like an anorexic poplar. The branches lowered with the pace of a man who's taking his first hot bath after a vasectomy. So yes, we're putting it up today.

"Great great! I'll give it a fresh cut." He revved up the chain saw, revved it up REVVED it up and began hacking away at the base of the tree, eyes wide, a terrible grin on his face. Either he loved the smell of pine, or he had a deep-seated hatred of trees (Cellulose! 'Tis the devil's marrow, I tell ye! ) and this season was a time of great release for him. Eleven months spent indoors, oiling his chain saw, peering out the windows at the trees, mocking him where they stood. Wait 'til Christmas. Ye won't be laughin' then.

I jammed the tree into the back of the Probe, a car designed to fit anything. If you arrange the seats and the hatchbacks correctly, you can probably fit another Probe inside. But your visibility is somewhat diminished when 80 percent of your car consists of Tree, and I was hesitant to make any turns. Most other cars were also carrying trees, equally blinded; we were like a swarm of Cessnas in a fog bank.

Good thing I wasn't driving the other car, the one with high powered airbags: one front-end collision, and the airbag would launch the tree out the hatchback like an ICBM. Someone would swerve to avoid it, hit someone else, setting off another airbag, firing another tree out the back - and so on and so on until a tree sailed into the lot from which it had been purchased. And the chainsaw man would have a stroke: it's back to settle the score!

Home with no mishap. Jasper Dog looked at the tree, his ears back, his tail in a low slow uncertain wag. Bringing a tree into the den: what's the point? That's what separated the den from the rest of the world: absence of trees. Now everything's ambiguous. And dogs are unnerved by ambiguity.

He sat on the steps and watched us as my wife and I trimmed the branches with the old familiar ornaments - including the little house with the glowing fireplace from our first married Christmas, now on its eighth year of duty. I reminded my wife that some day the fire is not going to glow when plugged in, and that this will have no metaphorical implications. I mean, someday the blinking revolving Santa will neither blink or revolve. Doesn't mean Santa's dead. (Just sober.)

Then we turned down the lights, put another log on the pyre, turned up the Tchaikovsky, hugged each other and looked at the tree. And of course those three little words come to mind, as they always do:

It looks crooked. ---- James Lileks is a nationally syndicated columnist for Newhouse News Service, as well as a columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. He's in the Washington Post now and then. His latest collection is "Fresh Lies," published by Pocket Books.