Wood ol’ days on family farm
A S a kid, it was my unofficial chore to dress up like an elf and hand out candy canes to visitors at my family’s farm.
On weekends in December, my sister and I wore pointy red caps and hauled the treats around in a wooden bowl, which was fun until puberty hit and I realized I was desperately uncool.
I grew up on a Christmas-tree farm in Tualatin, Ore., where the f irs far outnumber the humans. My parents, a fun breed of West Coast hippie-hick, bought the 6acre farm for peanuts in 1987.
The first year, my mom set up a “U-Cut” operation, meaning if you wanted a tree, she’d hand you a saw. She sold noble firs — trees that now cost up to $1,000 in Manhattan— for $5 each. Most were nice 6-footers, but in our neck of the woods, the hustle was like selling sand at the beach.
The trees were a labor of love for my mom, who worked in a nursery in her 20s. She would tie little green sticks to the tops of seedlings so they grew straight.
In the summer, she sometimes looked plucked from a horror movie, covered in mud and clutching a machete-sized knife, which she used to shear the trees into tight triangles.
As years passed, the trees got taller and prettier, and she charged $10 per tree, which was still dirt cheap, even in the ’90s.
Families around town made trips to our farm part of their Christmas tradition. Suburban kids got a kick out of our animals.
There was Honky the donkey, Billy the goat and Packwood the pig, a bloated porker my mom named after then-Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood, whom she called “a male chauvinist pig.”
One year, thieves slipped onto the property and stole several large blue spruces by digging them up, roots and all, which left moon-like craters in the field.
Another year, my parents were hellbent on rounding up the whole family — including the animals — for a Christmas-card photo-op in front of a field of our trees.
Our dog, Jake, spooked Honky, who bucked me and my sister off. I hit the ground, and my sister landed on top of me. It was chaos.
As a teen, I thought living on the farm was embarrassing. I was self-conscious and didn’t want friends to think I was a muddymugged country bumpkin.
It took 15 years living in concrete jungles, including the Big Apple, to fully appreciate the farm, where my mom now sells Douglas firs and noble firs for $5 a foot, or $30 for a 6-footer.
And now, as a grown-up, I realize the perks of the farm again. For one, it smells piney— like Christmas — all year long.
My whiskey-drinking family can be as loud as we want on holidays; there’s nobody around for miles. And, not to brag, but the Christmas tree that lights up my parents’ old farmhouse is the best in town.
After all, they get first pick.