Closed for the season

We were warned but we weren't ready

A picture of my very unhelpful forest

For seven years we’ve climbed into the truck on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and driven across the valley to Salo’s to cut our Christmas tree. The truck has changed, the children have increased in number and grown larger, but Salo’s, beloved tiny Salo’s, with no internet presence and no phone number, has been open.

There’s nothing that obviously special about Salo’s. There are no festive lights or decorations, no hot chocolate, and certainly no wagon rides or Christmas music. There’s just a row of ancient saws hanging on a peg board, a handwritten sign, and either the husband or wife stepping out of their little wooden house to greet you. To find the trees you have to make a steep climb to the top of a hill where they all stand atop strangely long, bare trunks, like flamingos perched on a single delicate leg. When choosing a tree, it’s necessary to take many steps back, crane your neck upward, and use your imagination. It is one of a handful of activities we do each year (diving into the swimming hole on a hot summer day, picking wild blackberries on the ridge, stacking split firewood in the shed) that feel like a direct line to our relatives, going back for generations. It’s a deeply unmanufactured experience.

But this year we packed into the truck, drove across the valley and up the hill to see a sign that said CLOSED FOR THE SEASON.

We knew this was coming, hypothetically. The owners, older with adult kids living in California, had been warning us for years that they were in the process of closing. They weren’t planting any new trees, they said. They’d stay open until they sold what they had, and then it would be over. But last year there were still plenty of trees. I didn’t think it’d happen so soon. As my husband said in the quiet truck, each of us silent in our disappointment, “Salo’s was the only thing close to us.”

It’s true. We live close to nothing—not a gas station, not a Dollar General, not a restaurant, not a hardware store. Salo’s was the closest thing, the one thing that was convenient. You don’t realize until you’ve lived rurally how good it can feel when a task feels convenient. We drove the ten minutes back to the house, trying to think of what to do. Where else was there to go? We couldn’t think of a single place, and a Google search revealed nothing within a 45-minute radius. It was the afternoon. By the time we got anywhere the light would be gone.

Surely, we said to one another, we can find a little tree on our own land. We have 210 acres after all, and most of it is wooded. Never mind that it was 20 degrees, and there were twelve inches of snow on the ground. This would work, and maybe even be better!

I did a mental scan of the evergreen trees on our property. There were the two pine groves, about an acre each, planted on the hillside by my grandfather sixty years ago, the result of a government-funded incentive program. They grow in rows, perfectly straight, eighty feet tall, with no branches and no seedlings. That wasn’t going to work. We have dense, sacred groves of wild hemlocks (we call one spot in the center of the hillside grove “The Cathedral”), but they are so big and grow so densely that absolutely nothing survives on the floor beneath them except for the occasional fungi sprouting on a rotting log. We considered, for a few minutes, the one little fir tree below the barn, near the creek. It stands all alone, growing only marginally larger over the years, its roots perpetually soggy from seasonal floods. We went so far as to grab the saw and begin trudging toward the flats where it stood, but in the end, we couldn’t do it. I’d miss looking out and seeing its lone shape, which, in the right light from the distance of the house, often looks like a person gazing back at you.

Unflagging in our quest, we hiked up the hillside under the golden end-of-day sun, the snow blowing like sand from our footsteps, and searched, fruitlessly, for some tree we’d never seen before. Very quickly the boys lost interest—H hiking down to the edge of the pond to break ice, R throwing snowballs at his dad, who darted between tree trunks. I set out by myself, walking in wider and wider circles, scanning for trees. There was nothing. I’m a little bit embarrassed to admit I sat down on a fallen tree in four-inch-deep snow and felt like crying.

I love the Sunday-after-Thanksgiving-Christmas-tree tradition, although, in all honesty, it has often been fraught. Inevitably, on that day, something had always gone wrong and spoiled everyone’s mood—my husband and I would have a petty fight and wouldn’t be speaking to each other, or we’d all be tired from a long trip to Virginia to see family, or everyone would be sour because it was 40 degrees and raining, or because one kid skipped a nap and the other was hungry. The one exception was 2020. It felt momentous to be able to go somewhere—anywhere—as a family. To be in “public”. It was an incredibly special outing (one of the only ones I did with R in his first two years of life!) in a time when nothing felt special, just scary.

I sat on my log and threw a silent, invisible, little fit. Even if it was sometimes miserable, I still wanted it! I didn’t want to be traipsing around my own farm, looking for trees that didn’t exist. I wanted to be at Salo’s. I wanted to be doing the thing we’d always done. I wanted to wrangle this unwieldy, overwhelming, complex thing we call life into a little box that made things seem simple, if even for a few hours. You go to Salo’s, you cut down the tree, you decorate the tree. Nothing more, nothing less. Please, I said to the forest around me, give me this one thing.

We went to sleep in a treeless house. The next morning, I woke up full of determination. I Googled “How to open a Christmas tree farm.” A very helpful guide from Cornell Cooperative Extension popped up. I read the whole thing from top to bottom before I even took my first sip of tea. It’s an incredible undertaking. There’s the upfront cost, the land preparation, the planting, the maintenance, and then, of course, the selling of the trees, assuming they’re not taken by weeds or pests or blight or inclement weather. Assuming they even grew in the first place. And on top of that, if we planted trees this spring the first one wouldn’t be ready for harvest until my 7-year-old was a 17-year-old, probably leaving to go to college. I put down my phone. I was still sad, but I no longer felt angry. I don’t blame Salo’s. It’s a miracle they ever existed at all.

My kids, for their part, aren’t upset. More than anything, they want a glimmering tree to lie beneath on these snowy mornings—how we get it doesn’t matter so much to them. They trust that we’ll figure it out. And they’re right. We will. We always do.