Forget Black Friday, get a Christmas tree | Reporter’s notebook

Published 10:55 am Monday, November 24, 2014

The weekend following Thanksgiving, including “Black Friday,” is when many Americans choose to show their gratitude and appreciation for their many blessings in life by storming the gates of retail stores, swarming through aisles and engaging in quasi-mortal combat with another soccer mom over who will ultimately claim possession of the new electronic gadget at a questionably reduced price, only to find out it’s already obsolete by the time they get it to the checkout stand.

For my family, this concept never quite caught on. We instead make it a tradition to forsake the chaos of consumerism by participating in the ancient yuletide ritual of selecting that most important symbol, the Christmas tree.

If picking out a Christmas tree is a fine art, consider me a tree snob.

Some people judge a man by his lawn. I judge him by his Christmas tree, so when I come across ugly artificial spruce trees with obviously plastic branches and hideous LED lights in a front window that make the home resemble a kitsch nightmare worthy of a Thomas Kinkade painting, I can’t help but wonder if Santa has that address on a “no fly” list of his own.

Then there are the real trees I recycled as a Boy Scout that were truly a sad sight to behold. Even Charlie Brown would have called them puny.

But it’s not just about the type of tree. The ceremonial pageantry is totally unnecessary but the enjoyable rituals are equally as important as that grand, glorious moment when it is put into place in the living room and the angel is made alit without simultaneously shorting out the fusebox.

It simply isn’t appropriate to run over to a hardware store and pick up a scrawny already dead twig settled against other trees like stacked corpses after a battle. In a day and age when you can practically get everything done for you without lifting so much as your index finger to click the mouse button and order it, our modern, pampered, over-urbanized population can use a little bit of exercise by chopping down that tree themselves with their own axe, preferably while wearing flannel and a five o’ clock shadow.

While trekking into the wild wilderness and looking for a raw, untamed evergreen to fell, a heightened sense of taste and style has always compelled us Martinells to search across the length and breadth of the many Christmas tree farms in the region. For years my family drove out to a farm in the Cascades run by an elderly couple until they ran out of trees worth selling. I like to think we padded their retirement fund to their satisfaction by the time they closed it.

The trouble with tree farms on this side of the mountains is the rain. Nothing is more depressing than setting out to find a Christmas tree amid a hideous cloud cover, rain and all the wet misery that accompanies it.

Wandering among the tall rows of trees, one is permitted but a few moments in life to be ridiculously narrow-minded, judgmental, picky, choosy, what name you, without any condemnation whatsoever. In fact, the more judgmental you are, the better the tree you drag out.

You think that one tree appears acceptable? Well, it has a bit of a bare patch on that one side. Not good enough.  Some appear attractive from afar, but upon closer examination the needles appear too thick and awkward. No go.

For me, the Pseudotsuga trees, or Douglas fir, are the most beautiful. If they’re grown properly, they’re full, have a natural symmetry and you don’t have to spray fake scent to make them smell the way they should.

Unfortunately, there are these things called family members. They hold these things called opinions, and their opinions are not always harmonious with each other. Or mine.

This collision is what you might refer to in some situations as family politics.

Whether tempers possibly flared and conflicting beliefs clashed, I can neither confirm nor deny. But if, theoretically, such an event ever took place, it proved beneficial to remind one and all that our circumstances were far better standing together in the field than in some store struggling to avoid an early death by asphyxiation at someone’s hand.

So when you’re tempted by that Black Friday ad, consider getting a respectable Christmas tree instead.

Trust me, the new gadget can wait.

TJ Martinell is a reporter with the Kirkland Reporter.