The Christmas Tree Hunt -- A Really Old Tradition

From the Teamoakville Blog. Dec 23, 2007

Dec 23, 2007

Driving home from Chris's hockey team's Christmas party today, the very old Cat Stevens song, Father and Son, came on the radio. Growing up, that song was just another song.

Later, its melancholy parable of the son who knows the house isn't big enough for both him and his dad, and the dad who knows it too but wants everything to stay the same, rang so true it hurt.

And I looked over at Chris, chocolate cupcake frosting on his face and a Santa hat on his head and completely oblivious to the song.

It put me mind of the many great Christmases I had as a kid. I thought I'd share a memory.

When I was a kid growing up in what was then rural Nova Scotia, we had this Christmas tradition we called simply the Christmas Tree Hunt.

Every year about two weeks before Christmas our folks, or sometimes just dad, would take us back into the woods behind our house to find a tree. The land was steep and rolling and crisscrossed with old logging roads and if it sounds a little bucolic, that's because it was.

The evergreens grew high and formed a canopy over the old rutted roads and moss-covered stumps and depending on the weather you could be knee-deep in snow or mud, or walking along frozen land crunching shell ice on the little puddles in the tire ruts formed decades ago.

There used to be fields hidden among the trees -- the further back you went, the greater the adventure. As boys we called them First Field, Second Field and Third Field. A really good day was spent sitting on a rock wall in Third Field surrounded by grass or snow or whatever the season presented and telling tall tales. Sometimes you'd see a deer, but we were usually too loud for all but the most deaf and stupid deer.

And among my peers there was a legend of a Fourth Field. If it existed, I never found it.

Those woods were one of my favourite places -- in the summer they were the path back to Beaver Pond (which was really a small lake) to fish and in the winter, well, it was the hunting ground for Christmas trees.

An uncle owned much of the land back there then so taking a tree or two was no big deal.

Over the years the tree ritual grew into a spectacle of near-Olympic proportion as boyfriends and girlfriends tagged along and dove into the buffet lunch that was added to feed the tree hunters.

Inevitably, the boyfriends and girlfriends morphed into husbands and wives and then grandchildren and dogs followed and the tradition took on new life for a few years.

Pad even got in on one as a toddler visiting from Edmonton, but Chris never did.

Time and distance are cruel masters on some things and such it was for the Christmas Tree Hunt, which doesn't happen anymore.

Crueler still is that you can no longer walk into the woods behind my parents' house and tread an unencumbered path all the way to Beaver Pond, a distance of maybe 600 or 700 metres.

A subdivision of fine new homes is slowly eating away at that acreage -- the old wood roads and evergreen canopy are all but gone. And if Fourth Field ever existed, it is now surely occupied by a 3,000-square-foot  home with double attached garage.

Christmas Tree Hunts today are more a function in suburban shopping mall parking lots, or perhaps to a tree farm to cut your own.

And you know, that's OK too.

Because Christmas is about family and creating memories for your kids and stories, like this one, that I can tell to my kids and your stories that you can tell to yours.

Below, courtesy of Google Earth, is a map of where I grew up. The star is where the family home still is. The dark purple line is the main road -- and in those days, it was the only road. There was a time that the golf course you see was all woodland. The subdivisions on the right trampled other woodlands we played in as kids.

The area on the left bordered with blue was prime Christmas Tree Hunt territory. And you can see the subdivision between by parents' house and Beaver Pond.

I'm pretty sure my house sits on what used to be someone's farm in north Oakville, so I'm not going to begrudge those new folks in Windsor Junction their chance to carve new memories and traditions and, I hope, add something positive to the community in my old home town.

Like the point of that old Cat Stevens' song, things change. It's just the way it is.

Merry Christmas. Enjoy those hockey players running around your house and the busy days and nights they bring that illuminate our lives. Share a memory with them this week. Create a memory.

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