A Warm Christmas

It wouldn’t be long now, I thought, as I shivered in the cold.

One by one, I watched as they came for my family, my friends, my neighbors.

First, they came for the cedars, and I said nothing.

Then, they came for the birch. I maintained a wooden silence.

Finally, they came for me and the rest of the pines.

How I envied my deciduous cousins. When, each fall, as part of them died and fell to the ground, it didn’t seem, then, that it was too many steps removed from death of leaves, to branches, to trunk.

But we conifers have less intimate relationships with death. We know no seasons, lifeblood coursing through our branches, trees and cones from January through December. We know only life.

But not on this Christmas Eve.

I remember vividly the sound of the cool metal blade striking against my neighbor’s flesh. One hack, two hacks, three. I estimated 15 to 20 swings of that ax to bring most trees of my size and age down.

The chopping noise wasn’t what turned my stomach most, though. It was the splitting, cracking and eventual fall that followed the final strike. Splintering, falling, dragging away.

We knew not what fate met the others after they were pulled from our forest. Would we meet a new life, perhaps? Re-planted in a veritable garden of eden? Brought in from the cold to live as a domesticated plant? Potted was a term I had heard before in passing.

Was there an afterlife to look forward to? A never ending forest in a never ending summer, free from woodpeckers, termites, axes and disease?

This brief thought warmed me as I shivered in the cold.

Despite my proclivity for colder weather, I longed for warmth. The balmy summer season was always my favorite time, feeling the sun’s brilliant rays through my green needles was a rare delight.

“Please,” I thought. “Let the end be warm.”

Then came the footsteps. Crunch, crunch, crunch through the fresh snow. Faintly whistling a holiday tune. Both noises grew louder as my flannel-clad reaper approached.

The first cut was almost painless. The ax head chopped straight through the frosted bark covering my trunk, but did not go much deeper. It was the second swing that produced a side-splitting wound, as my sap, my blood, leaked onto the blade’s edge and dripped down onto the snow below.

I could only barely register the blows that followed as the polished steel split each layer of my flesh down to my core. By the time I had reached the point of toppling over, I felt that the eventual separation from my roots would be a merciful blessing and I would no longer feel this excruciating pain.

But I was mistaken.

As I lay on the snow-covered forest floor, I counted each falling snowflake landing upon my branches as each one was pulled from me by my murderer. The sensation of each limb being plucked from my body ranged from mild (when he was able to snap one off cleanly) to the horrendous (when a thin strip of my skin would cling to the branch as it was pulled off, creating a lengthy scar down my side).

Once I had been plucked like a Tyson’s broiler, each needle, branch and cone indiscriminately stripped from me, I felt the nails hammered into my side, connected to chains and I was soon hoisted up onto a truck, brought to a destination unknown.

The blade I encountered next made me long for the clean, quick and smooth action of the ax. The serrated teeth of the saw dug into me as the thin steel dragged across me, back and forth, separating my torso.

I was lifted and placed in a brick-lined chamber, and all I felt was cold and dark. There was no light, no forest floor, no birds, no sky, and no sweet smelling wind. Just the pure absence of light, heat, air, color and life.

Was this the end? If it was, my only disappointment lay in that it was so … cold.

But then I felt the warmth at last.

As the flames from the Christmas fire began to burn my flesh, my bark charred and my needles burned off one by one. My bark glowed with embers and I began to split down the middle, letting the fire inside. I could feel the fire begin to boil my sap, making occasional popping sounds.

I was grateful at least that the end was warm.

Remember me this Christmas Eve, and never forget my charred remains as they sit in audience to your Christmas morning and Christmas dinner.

Through my torture and suffering I have heated your hearth this Christmas Day, as my offspring will too for generations to come. Do your best to ignore the charred corpse in the fireplace as you sip your egg nog. Toast the holiday by the light and warmth of my burning flesh.

I am your Yule log.