Bear's Den: "Help the needy in your community - give'em your old Christmas tree"

You know, there´s a lot to be said for routine stuff – Christmas and everyday doings, alike. Take the simple morning routine for instance. Why, if you didn´t have this everyday practice, then you´d show up at work with un-brushed teeth and disheveled hair. Your face or legs wouldn´t be shaved, and, possibly the worst thing about skipping this habit… is that you could arrive all fidgety, having not visited the lavatory yet. Yep, and in my neck of the woods, if I don´t follow through with my Christmas routine, then I´m depriving many in my community of food, shelter and rudimentary safety. Why, that'd be heinous compared to breaking a measly morning habit, eh. Well, Christmas may be over, but I´m no Scrooge. I´ll drop that dead pine right where it´ll help those unfortunates – I surely will.

Everybody has probably heard that song, "The Twelve Days of Christmas", eh? Well, it comes from the age-old timetable set for this holiday season. The normal ´routine´ is for the "12 days of Christmas" to begin on December 24th and go until January 5th. Sure, and there´s even an old wives´ tale that says… that if your Christmas tree is in the house past midnight December 31, bad luck will befall you for the entire year. Hmm. Well, even when my domestic boss was a young wife... she must´ve partly believed this tale, because our tree is always out of the house on January one. Like most, our family has a routine for the Christmas holiday season. The first Saturday after Thanksgiving, we go out and cut the tree. It stays up until New Year´s Day, when it´s undecorated and I remove it. Uh-huh, and this is where I have to be careful not to take away food, shelter and rudimentary safety from those in my community. I drag that baby out and roll it down the hill into the woods. Voila! I´ve been a benefactor and it´s the least I can do for my neighbors. Now, I don´t know what folks do – that don't have a Christmas tree or that put up fake one. Maybe they perform their charity in different ways – I´m not sure. But for me, dropping our old Christmas tree into the wildland for the needy is my routine. And that´s because my neighbors are, well… kind´a wild.

The old blue spruce, dropped over the hillside above the stream, has a twofold purpose here on the Rez. It automatically creates a wildlife habitat and, when stopped between trees, it works as an erosion wedge, to boot. And yep, dead trees do, actually, create wildlife habitat, too. Um-hmm, amphibians (salamanders, toads & turtles), fungi (mushrooms & lichens) wood-dwelling insects (ants, spiders, crickets, grubs, etc.), reptiles (snakes), birds, and assorted small mammals all use this old Yule tree. Yeah, it becomes everything from food to shelter to rudimentary safety for them, and, in my neck of the woods – these guys are my neighbors. Now, to my notion, this kind´a disposal is the best form of use for an old Christmas tree. Sure, and even though I´ve got college degrees in the area, and have spent my life in environmental conservation, I learned this form of charity long before, as a part of my up-bringing.

My Uncle Chester was an old Tennessee river-bottom Indian – a guy who could pluck an eating squirrel, in the head, out of a ninety-foot tree with an open-sighted .22 rifle, or plant a seed on one grain of soil and grow a tomato plant from it. Um-hmm, and back when I was young, artificial Christmas trees hadn´t been invented yet, so everyone had a real one. He taught me to drag the old tree to a discreet place in the yard for just this purpose. We´re all part of the Earth Mother and this is how we give back. Thus, when I got married, our first home was in town, and every year, when the tree came down, I´d drag it to the wayside and then… field questions from my two-legged neighbors about why… it was still there come summer. The city picks up dead trees, they´d say. Sure, sure, and I would explain the following.

If a body can live with the asthetics of having a browning pine in the yard, then by placing the old Christmas tree in an out of the way locale provides plenty of the stuff for neighbors that most of us seldom see. For those members of our community, it provides habitat. Yep, and for my two-legged ones, it presented a good gossip outlet, as well. They sometimes didn´t like the tree left in the yard. They thought I was being untidy or… just too ´Indian´. But, gossip or not, I´d let the tree stay in the yard through the winter and summer. It gave shelter to everything from fox squirrels to chickadees, and, when the thaw came, it provided even more for other wildlife through the warm months. By the following fall, when the City DPW picked up yard refuse, most of the needles had fallen from the old Yule tree. Its usefulness as shelter had waned. So, I´d set her out by the street for the DPW to haul away. They took it to a yard and chipped it up for mulch which was still used in an environmentally sound way, so it´s a win-win scenario. Yessir, and a few months later, we'd cut another Christmas tree and the ´routine´ began again. It´s been a practice that we faithfully continue every year.

So, in my neck of the woods, if I don´t follow through with my Christmas routine, then I´m depriving many in my community of food, shelter and rudimentary safety. I´m no Scrooge, so I´ll drop that dead pine… right where it´ll help those unfortunates - yep. And hey… it´s ´routine´, anyway.