From Washington state to NC to DC, one Christmas tree's long journey

The Tree stands packed with other trees, indistinguishable in the little felled forest that leans along the racks. The firs are bunched in the upright, uptight shipping pose needed for the tractor-trailer that dropped them off two days earlier, their limbs seized by twine in a severe pillar that belies their shaggy looseness.

Since the spring of 2003, its world had been the mountain, its life the unchanging rhythm of slow growth and summer prunings.

The Tree does have a shape and character of its own. But its uniqueness will remain theoretical until someone pulls it from the anonymous mass, shakes it free, examines it, knows it. And, finally, anoints it. "Honey? I think I found one."

But for now, the Tree is just one of the 30 million that have been cut and shipped around the country by mid-December. Some are already deep into their brief star turn as holiday icons, adorned and alight in living rooms and front halls, bank lobbies and town squares.

Others, like the 400 or so trees in this lot beside Frager's Hardware in Washington, D.C., are waiting to bloom into the centerpiece of America's defining cultural maelstrom, the year-end blizzard of sentimentality, commerce and botany.

The shoppers arrive throughout the day. At first glance, they are as indistinguishable as the trees they seek, a short spectrum of dark topcoats and fleece. But it takes only seconds for a tree seller to fit a tree buyer into one of the major categories:

Newlyweds, who must gingerly reconcile his inviolate family tradition of jolly fat trees with her devotion since girlhood to ceiling scrapers. (Coming later that night, icicles vs. tinsel.)

The Junior Leaguer, who cares mostly about a just-so shape and branches capable of carrying all 12 of her Waterford crystal bells.

The Dad on a Mission, who stops on the way home and buys the tree closest to the cash register.

The Tree Rescuer, who looks for the bare patches and skimpy branches of a "Charlie Brown tree" to redeem with love and paper chains.

But mostly there are families. The kids who see picking a tree not as an errand but an adoption. Who fan out to find the tallest one, even if it means cutting three years of growth from the trunk. Who are berserk with anticipation for the domestic alchemy about to occur, when this creature of the cold woods is transformed into the ultimate totem of indoor warmth by the application of charms collected over generations.

Inside the fenced lot, a little girl in a puffy blue jacket slips on the evergreen needles that coat the floor. Elizabeth Philbrick, manager of the tree lot, grabs a paperwhite bulb from behind the counter and presents it to the girl, telling her to put it in a pot with rocks and water and wait for the "Christmas miracle flower."

The girl stares with wide eyes. Her mom mouths a "Thank you."

Several families have passed by the Tree. Some have touched it, turned it, dismissed it. But in the late afternoon, it has made it into the final two for a dad and two daughters. Philbrick holds the two trees as the girls, ages 7 and 8, consider them.

The father stands behind his girls. "You want me to decide? I have to carry it in, so I'd pick that one. It looks lighter."

The girls' fingers swing the other way, toward the Tree. "That one!"

The father is David Butler, 46, who works in the production department of the Washington National Opera. He steps forward, gives the Tree a test heft, tugs on a branch.

"It is a good tree," he murmurs, turning the Fraser.

He turns to Philbrick, asks: "Where did it come from?"

At home in North Carolina

Three days earlier, the Tree is high on an Appalachian slope in northwestern North Carolina. It is the fifth tree from the left in the third row from the top on a steep patch of Ashe County belonging to Barr Evergreens.

Below spreads a broad snow-dusted valley carpeted with thousands of trees. Few of them are taller than 7 feet, and most are mere saplings. There are some blue spruces and a smattering of white pines down near a pond winking sunlight from its frozen surface. But most, like the Tree, are Frasers.

Source: http://www.heraldonline.com/2011/12/25/3621975/from-washington-state-to-nc-to.html

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