The Fir Tree, Revisited

I don’t have too many memories of my paternal grandfather. He wasn’t around as often as my other grandparents were and I didn’t know much about him until after he passed in 2002. However, there are two things about Grandpa that remain forever vivid in my mind.

The first of these things was his house. Grandpa and his wife were both chain smokers; so everything reeked of nicotine, dust, musty carpet, and cocker spaniel dander. They had two geriatric dogs who were blind, deaf, and quick to show their teeth. The floor was rotting in one of the bathrooms, so we couldn’t use it; and every last space was filled with gorgeous antique furniture that my sister and I couldn’t sit on because we were children and might accidentally break it.

Antiques weren’t the only things Grandpa hoarded, either. He also loved to record programs with his VCR and had stacks upon stacks of VHS tapes my sister and I would sometimes watch while the adults talked in another room. We’d sit in his sun room, watch videos on a tiny TV, and switch our attention to the manatees and other Florida wildlife swimming in the nearby river once we inevitably grew bored.

We also read a lot, and that brings me to the second thing I remember about Grandpa. One year, he bought us a beautiful two volume set of the world’s greatest fairy tales. The covers were mint green with gilded letters and the pages had gold leaf on the edges. They sparkled beautifully and I read them from cover to cover more times than I’m willing to count.

I also asked my parents to read these stories to me at bedtime. It was a toss-up. Some days, I’d pick something new like “The Twelve Cats” or “The Tinderbox.” On others, my parents would pick something like “The Little Mermaid” and warn me in advance that this wouldn’t be the same as the Disney adaptation.

There were all sorts of crazy things in that anthology: magical cats that could make a donkey’s tail grow out of your forehead, a dog with eyes the size of windmills, cannibal witches living in gingerbread houses…I even found out that one of my favorite Disney princesses died and became sea foam instead of getting together with the prince she loved. You’d think that would be the one that traumatized me: the one that shook me to my core and still lingers in the back of my subconscious a quarter of a decade later…but you’d be wrong.

You’d be very, very wrong.

Allow me to introduce you to “The Fir Tree.” It’s a lesser-known Hans Christian Andersen story that revolves around the life of a healthy and beautiful little fir tree in the middle of a forest. It had a beautiful life with everything it needed to thrive, but it was so preoccupied with growing tall that it never stopped to consider how good it truly had it in the woods.

As a child, the little fir irritated me. All it did was whine and grouse about how it wished to grow up so it could dance in the wind and see the sky. Then, once it discovered that some of its fallen comrades became masts for ships, growing up wasn’t good enough anymore. Now it wished to become a mast as well! And again, once the sparrows told the fir about Christmas trees and how “incomparably beautiful” they were, it wanted more than anything to become one.

Nothing else would make it happy, it thought. Nothing else would ever compare. This was the fate it wished to have and anything less would be deemed an insult to its very existence.

Eventually, the fir tree got its wish. It was chopped down, adorned with decorations, placed in a beautiful home…and promptly thrown into a dark attic as soon as the Christmas season ended. Once it was all dried up and mostly dead, the children ripped off the gold star—the only thing the tree had left to remind it of its former beauty—and it was chopped up and turned into firewood. It died, realizing much too late that its happiest days were in the woods after all.

The older I got, and the more times I found myself returning to those old fairy tales, the more “The Fir Tree’s” message resonated with me. I was a frustrated child who thought that growing up would solve all of my problems. Once I was old enough to drive, then I could go wherever I wanted. Once I was old enough to attend college, then I could live my life by my own rules. Once I was old enough to work, then I could make my own money and actually start to enjoy my life.

But it wasn’t like that. Not at all. I crashed my first car into a telephone pole to avoid hitting a dog. I had a traumatic experience in college that still haunts me to this day. I graduated during one of the worst times in modern history to look for work and most people in my generation will never see the wealth and fortune our parents’ generation did.

The world we’re inheriting has too much wind and too much sunshine. We’re throwing ourselves into relationships that adorn us with ersatz love and affection, only for it all to be ripped away once we stop being what our partners need. We dry up and slowly wither in our cubicles or workspaces, devoid of any of the gentle warmth we were shown in our youth. And then, once we can’t give any more to the corporations that chopped us down, we burn in a blaze and realize our best days were the ones we were in such a hurry to skip through.

So please, before your youth is gone and you lose your gold star, do what the air and sunlight begged the tree to do and actually listen. Rejoice in your presence. Rejoice in what you have and what you are right now. You’ll never be this young again, nor do you know for certain when those days will come to an end. You’ll be firewood before you know it, so grow. Thrive. Spread your branches.