Don’t let the wheels come off your Christmas tree

My first foray into the realm of artificial forestry involved drilling my thumb with the screw gun while trying to fasten artificial Christmas trees to platforms fitted with smart casters.

Smart casters, as opposed to dumb casters, move freely in various directions, much like working in amateur theater. There’s a lot of drift here, the lead set carpenter can easily get snowed under by a constant flurry of requests you cannot turn down from a director snatching at half-snapped bubble wrap in a vain attempt to stave off sanity. I might have enjoyed working with fake greenery if boughs weren’t constantly dropping on my head and I didn’t have to render these trees easier for young actors to move about just a few hours before dress rehearsal.

Yes, little Ralphie Parker’s dad would have his chance to wheel and deal with the tree lot salesman for the family’s perfect balsam — downstage right.

The quest for the perfect Christmas tree, that green symbol of peace most of us recognize regardless of religious persuasion, has been the inspiration for many scriptwriters and comedians. Such memorable characters as the shyster tree lot salesman, the kid who hogties the single parent with guilt for not buying the biggest tree on the lot, the penny-pinching parent who goes for the needle-free specimen and the schlocked and flocked neon fake tree spinning out of control on its revolving automatic stand made us laugh and cry over our perfect tree obsession.

Yes, even the trees themselves have become characters. We all know what a Charlie Brown tree is. This shedding stick of a tree symbolizes the need to nurture and protect during the darkest days of winter. It so warms our hearts that some shoppers deliberately seek them out. The fake trees I labored under on stage had names as well: Ichabod, the little threadbare stripling, and Mugger, the killer 6-footer that flattened any sixth-grader within range. The other trees remained well behaved and, thankfully, anonymous in the upstage wings.

Fake Christmas trees. I grew up during the germination of these wonders. Invented in 1930 by the Addis Brush Co., inspired by the popularity of its No. 1 seller, a green toilet bowl brush, they eventually hybridized from the original green variety into a range of colors from pink to silver. These out-of-the-box wonders, 85 percent of which are now made in China, answered the prayers of every busy housewife. That is, until Martha Stewart began fertilizing the seedbeds of long dormant holiday decorator obsessive-compulsives.

Today’s artificial tree hunter can bag exotic specimens already lighted and decorated with your choice of conifer, automatic scents for that “real tree” experience, and a recording of “Oh, Tannenbaum” digitally embedded in their frames.

Living in the land of spruce, we have never bothered to buy a Christmas tree. An admission that puts us in a very exclusive group of the 16 percent who cut their own. Christmas tree hunting requires stamina, hot thermoses, an axe and a saw, a sense of humor, a strong back and lots of youthful energy. Of course, I’m speaking of those long lost days when we actually had knee-deep snow to crawl through on our hunt for the perfect specimen. These days you need ice creepers and a cold six-pack.

Hunters of these elusive trees braved the flu, frostbite, delirium, hypothermia and ridicule. We’ll always have fond memories about how red our thighs were when we finally peeled off our frozen pants and clapped our claw-like hands around a steaming mug of hot buttered rum.

We always had a perfect tree. We faked it. We’d thin out a stand of several Charlie Browns, leaving the best tree to mature. Then we used the best cull for the main stem and added some branches to fill out the bare spots. A good drill bit, a drill/driver, some carpenter’s glue, screws, some limbs from the donor tree and voila! A perfect Currier and Ives black spruce even Martha would be proud of. As a bonus, these trees were designed to self-destruct and leave a nice pile of needles on the floor for your compost bin. By disrupting the water uptake drilling through the cambium layer you could guarantee the tree would be ready to go on the bonfire before Valentine’s Day!

Writer, artist and gardener, Brooke Heppinstall recently served as lead carpenter for Jean Shepherd’s “A Christmas Story” for Alaska Theater of Youth and as set designer and lead carpenter for its production of “Ramona Quimby.” She is owner of WoolWood Studio & Gardens, www.woolwood.blogspot.com.