A Tree-mendous Story Fir You

If you want to up your Christmas game, buy yourself a Christmas tree farm. That’s what my grandfather did in 1945 and it’s been a festival of fun for generations since.

DaDa (listen, if I’m going to keep writing about these people, you should know my paternal grandparents were MomMom and DaDa) purchased 62 acres of land that came with two old houses right next to each other. By the time I came around, a connecting addition had been built, making it all one house that my grandparents lived in. I had been dimly aware that they had once been separate structures, but I didn’t know that my grandparents had rented out the smaller house while occupying the larger one until the day of my college graduation. I introduced one of my friends to my family and she introduced her family to us, and they recognized each other. Her parents had rented the little house. What are the odds?

Back in 1945, DaDa had a job in Philadelphia but had dreams of being a gentleman farmer. After he passed, we went through his old records and found two canceled checks he’d written. One for purchasing the farm and one for a huge order of Christmas trees. The check for the trees was written first. He was a man with a plan, but thank heavens that property sale went through!

Over the years, DaDa bought additional land. Some was immediately adjacent to what they already owned, expanding the farm, and some land was remote, creating satellite farms. The first time my dad brought my mom home to meet the family, they drove past one of the remote properties and Dad pointed it out as being “the farm”. And then they kept driving, and driving, and driving. Mom briefly wondered if she was dating some sort of land baron until realizing the properties were not contiguous.

DaDa loved the farm so much it may have rubbed off on the rest of us. When my uncle was a boy, he looked across the fields at the farmhouse next door and declared his intention to live there someday. He moved in many decades ago, raised his family there, and is still there now.

My grandparents were always very social, and when they installed an in-ground pool, their friends’ love of the farm really picked up. Many of their friends would come by on nice summer afternoons for a swim, good company, and maybe some of MomMom’s outstanding cooking. They had one friend who was a military pilot. He had to log a certain amount of practice flight time and was given an amazing amount of leeway, allowing him to fly to just about any other military base that he was in the mood to go to, land, refuel, and come home. If a plane came in low and buzzed everyone at the pool, that meant he was on his way to the landing base and would be over for a swim shortly. If he came in low and buzzed them while dipping one wing and then the other, back and forth, it meant he had just flown to Maine and had live lobsters on board, and they should start boiling a big pot of water. This pilot was also known to find these required flights boring and confessed to falling asleep during them. Not to worry, he had a safety plan in place. He would smoke cigarettes while flying, and if the plane went into a nosedive because he nodded off, hot ashes would blow into his face and wake him up. I’m going to go ahead and assume there are more regulations around these types of flights now.

DaDa took his farming seriously. He was a member of the Christmas Tree Growers Association and I’m told he was the first person to grow Douglas Firs east of the Mississippi. He had a great friend who was also trying his hand at farming, and they were always trying new things and helping each other out. I imagine I might be annoyed if a friend of mine called and said he’d decided I needed a tractor so he bought me one at auction and – surprise - here’s what I owed, but my grandfather considered it a terrific adventure.

Although focused on trees, DaDa also had an experimental period when he raised sheep. Well, truth be told, he still had his day job in Philadelphia at the time, so it would be more accurate to say MomMom raised sheep. He and his friend decided to rent a ram to see if they could, you know, make more sheep. Again, they were both new to this, so had no idea they needed to put the ram in a pen with just one ewe. They let the ram run around a whole field of sheep doing his thing and it died. Of, I’m going to say, overexertion. But you’re thinking it and I’m thinking it. It f*cked itself to death. The cost went from renting a ram to replacing a ram. Live and learn!

I had no idea there’d been a sheep phase until my grandparents moved to a retirement community, downsizing from a giant farmhouse to an apartment right when I bought my house. A lot of their items wound up with me, including a braided rug MomMom had made. My dad took one look at it under my dining room table and said, “I remember the day a sheep escaped and got into the house and peed all over that.” Did you know that if you put your mind to it, you can get a whole rug into your washing machine?

MomMom made several braided rugs, often out of old clothes. Once her friends saw what she was doing, they would give her their hand-me-downs. Apparently at one fancy cocktail party friends of the family were spotted on their hands and knees in the living room examining a new rug. “Look! My old pants!”

MomMom studied art in college, and it came through in many crafty ways like that. She also did amazing needlepoint work, and one of her pieces was displayed in the Smithsonian as part of a Bicentennial exhibit. She never once mentioned that to me. She had multiple framed needlepoints in her home and when she moved to the apartment there were a few that I knew she loved that she left behind. I thought I’d help her see if she could fit them in at her new place after all, so I took them over and held them up where I thought they might fit. She just looked at me and asked, “Can you see that destroys the entire composition of the wall?” Those needlepoints are at my house now too.

I loved the time I spent at the farm. If I was there for Thanksgiving, I was allowed to help in the fields, cutting down trees, running them through the baler, and just generally seeing how much sap I could get on myself. DaDa was a Penn State alum and a huge fan of their football program. He would work in the fields with a hired crew on Saturdays during game time. Before there were VCRs, or Walkmans, he had to get creative to not miss the game. He got a little transistor radio he’d take with him, and it seemed wrong to him not to get some for the crew also. I remember being in the fields and hearing the game in surround sound as everyone walked around tuned in to the same station.

My family and I would go into the fields and choose our trees when we were there at Thanksgiving. In addition to the family tree, when we were kids, my sister and I were each allowed to choose a tree for our bedrooms. The rule was it could be equal to but no greater than our heights. Dad always commented on how we seemed to grow a foot or so every selection day (aka – we broke the rule pretty much every time). Having multiple trees was a win-win for our household. We loved having our own individual trees and all the tacky decorations we made in grade school went on our tree, not my parents’. One year, instead of putting up my decorations, I made an amazing tree fort for all my dolls and action figures. Mom seemed concerned but I had the best time ever playing with it and now we know that may have just been budding architect-dom.

The farm was fairly flat and one Christmas I had the audacity to complain about this topographical shortcoming because it meant I couldn’t go sledding. Instead of calling me out, DaDa kicked into turbo grandparent mode, went out to the barn, took a door off its hinges, removed the knob, and tied it to the back of the tractor. He attached flexible tubing to the exhaust to aim it away from my face and proceeded to pull me on the door all over the farm. I guess instead of sledding I went dooring? It was utterly fabulous.

For all of my happy memories, there is a secret seedy underbelly to the Christmas tree business. I’m not talking about the time DaDa fell through the barn floor. No, I’m talking about tree theft. People would sneak onto the property at night and help themselves. The ones stupid enough to use noisy chainsaws often got caught, but if they used a handsaw they really could take a lot. One night the whole family was coming back from a restaurant when DaDa spotted a stranger cutting down a tree. You haven’t lived until you’ve been in a high-speed car chase in an Oldsmobile, through fields and roads, chasing a tree thief. We got to meet the local police that night. Thrilling for young me and my sister.

On the opposite end of the spectrum was the person who snuck onto the property to decorate a tree. Different parts of the farm are planted each year so trees come to maturity at different times. When the field closest to the road was planted there was an adorably short tree right at an intersection. Someone covered it in tinsel and ornaments. For years. I never did learn who was behind it.

The farmhouse itself was also great, but quite old, like colonial times old, and things tended to break, especially when we stressed it by all staying there for holidays. I give credit to MomMom for keeping her sense of humor no matter what came her way. Now that I’m an adult, it doesn’t seem like it would necessarily strike me as funny to have a pipe spring a leak, causing all the floorboards to be ripped up and out for accessing the repair on Christmas Eve, with a houseful of guests. There was also a year the power went out right before Christmas Eve dinner, and my grandparents called their electrician only to discover he had died. Also the year the toilet broke, or the year the dishwasher broke, or the year the freezer broke. That was an easy one, it was quite cold out, so the food went outside. It’s almost like breaking things was catching, because one year when we visited at Christmas the heat in our car broke. The snow from our boots never melted the whole ride. Or the year we hit a massive pothole and got a flat tire. The trunk was full of presents which we had to unload to get to the spare. The bump had been so jarring, the hubcap came off and someone ran over it, so Dad threw it in the trunk to deal with later. After getting home and carefully hammering it back into shape, he went to reinstall it only to discover it was not our hubcap.

I have so many fantastically happy memories of the farm, and spending time with family there, but I’m determined to post this in time for Christmas so I’ll stop. For now.

Wishing a very merry Christmas to all who celebrate.