Saturday – the day of the ice storm – I accomplished an important Christmas moment. It was mid-afternoon. It was perhaps the worst possible time to be heading out on the roads. But there I was, loading up the car with the dog, my winter jacket and boots and a small saw. Nobody was around to hear it, but I made my traditional Christmas announcement.
“I think it’s a good day to get a Christmas tree,” I said and I think the dog – my Kerry blue terrier Finn McCool – was the only one to hear it. And he’s not fussy. A walk, whether in the woods for a tree or anywhere else for that matter, is all the same to him. All good.
So, off we went west of town into Christmas tree country to fulfill a tradition our family has upheld since I was a kid. As a boy back when Agincourt, Ont., was a village, I remember my dad, mom, sister and I made an excursion of retrieving a tree. Then, as my own kids grew up – whether in Alberta, Saskatchewan or here in Ontario – we’ve always repeated the ritual, if only to make the act of celebrating Christmas as natural as possible.
In fact, a number of traditions within traditions developed in the years our daughters – Quenby and Whitney – my wife and I trekked to one tree farm or another in search of that perfect Christmas greenery. Of course, we always made sure we went out together. We generally didn’t do it until the week before Dec. 25. Then, we always made sure one further important rule was upheld.
“We don’t cut until Quenby says, ‘Yes,’” we always said.
I don’t know why, but our older daughter seemed most choosy when it came to picking the right tree. And so, even if the rest of us reached consensus on a spruce, pine or fir, I never put blade to tree until Quenby gave her blessing. Well, now the girls are grown. They’ll be celebrating on their own – with their own growing families and eventually with all of us together on Christmas Day. But last Saturday, nobody was around to uphold the traditional trek into the woods, except the dog and me. And he never met a tree he didn’t like.
But this year’s trek delivered more tradition than I expected. Once Finn and I had negotiated the icy roads, the uphill drive to the jump-off point and the flatbed ride into the woods, at Smalley’s tree farm, it didn’t take us long to find a perfect tree – this year a spruce. When I cut through the base, being laden with a lot of ice, the tree keeled over with quite a thud. The haul back to the pick-up point took longer than I expected because it was so heavy. Then, I noticed another family behind me hauling a tree with a bit of difficulty.
“Can I help?” I called to the dad.
“That’d be a big help,” he said. And we introduced ourselves to each other. Dimitrios had just felled a spruce with his father George and his son. As we pulled his tree along together, I learned Dimitrios’s family members were from Newmarket. They were Greek. And that meant more parallels. My family background is Greek too. And so, next to a blazing bonfire and with hot chocolate that Smalley’s laid on for us back there in the woods, we reminisced some more. George and Dimitrios were also fulfilling their long-standing annual tradition of retrieving a Christmas tree from the wild. As with us, their trek to the woods for a tree was being handed down from George to Dimitrios; and they hoped, one day, George’s grandson would carry it on.
We talked about earlier days of Greek families in the GTA. We remembered large Greek religious services at Christmastime at the downtown churches. Sometimes when the weather was clement, the services spilled into the city streets. Choirs would continue to sing the Greek hymns and the congregation would spread greetings of “Merry Christmas” (in Greek) for blocks. Since we lived so far from downtown in those years, our family had eventually drifted away from participating in those services.
I mentioned that I had gone to Greek school on weekends back then; Dimitrios said that he’d gone weekly almost all his life. But because I had given up the Greek school before it could do any good, I pointed out that I had forgotten how to say “Merry Christmas” in Greek. So, as we loaded the freshly cut (and heavily ice-laden) Christmas trees into our respective vehicles at the entrance to the tree farm, I waved good-bye and Dimitrios re-taught me the greeting.
“Kalá Christoúgenna,” I repeated back to Dimitrios and his family.
This year, I had accomplished my tree-cutting tradition and received a Christmas gift – long lost by time – from a stranger.