Family Tree Finding The Perfect Pine Can Be A Prickly Operation

He came from a long line of Charlie Brown firs. Her family consistently chose the bushy pine.

Now married with a 3-year-old son of their own, Paul and Michele Good of Hayden must find a happy medium.

“We’ve kind of compromised,” Michele said. “It should be tall, but not too tall,” Paul explained. “Full, but not so bushy that we can’t hang anything.”

At Carrousel Enterprises, a festive tree farm five miles south of Coeur d’Alene, families milled through fir, spruce and pine trees Sunday, hunting for the perfect Tannenbaum.

For John Smith and Bette Price of Dalton Gardens, the task was simple. Both are native Minnesotans from families partial to similar saplings.

“We both agree … short needled tree,” said Price, describing the ease of their decision.

But for some families, agreeing on the perfect Christmas tree just isn’t a holly-jolly yuletide rite. Where there are decisions, there is discord.

“There’s always a decent interval between when we get here and when we get our tree,” explained Post Falls’ Edward Kok, who was waiting inside the barn as the family’s slightly lopsided tree was bound with red netting. His wife, Kevin, was more blunt.

“We looked at every tree in the lot and called each other a whole bunch of names. He threatened to saw my leg off,” she said, smiling.

Too sparse. Too short. Too prickly. Family members’ opinions echo between the neat rows of Peg and Don White’s 20,000-tree, cut-and-choose farm during the holidays.

“Too tall,” Bob Blessing cautions his wife Lori every year. Bob annually lops off the tip and whittles away the trunk of the trees Lori picks, sometimes reducing them by 3 to 4 feet for their Coeur d’Alene home.

“I like the empty look,” Lori said, lovingly noting it’s the same trait that attracts her to her husband.

“But I’m the one who always has to drag it in and out,” Bob counters.

“I love to argue about it,” he added, needling his wife. “That’s what marriage is all about.” When asked what makes the perfect tree, many husbands responded the same: It’s the one their wife likes.

“Mommy usually gets her way,” explained Thena Brown of Newman Lake.

While Lee Dawes of Post Falls gets to choose the tree, her husband Gary does insist on one thing.

“I insist she likes it,” he said. “Because once I put the saw to it, that’s it.”

The Whites grow 12 different species of trees to cater to the varying needs of different families.

“We learned a long time ago not to second-guess what people want,” Don White said. “The bigger the family, the more decisions they have to make and every family has its opinion as to what a good Christmas tree is.”

One year, Lynn Crouse of Post Falls brought home five different trees before his wife Pam agreed on one. She refers to it gravely as “the Charlie Brown year.”

The family used to live in the mountains of Montana, where Mother Nature presented the perfect tree every year. When they moved closer to the city, things changed. They drove from one indistinguishable lot to another, sometimes searching three hours before settling on a mediocre tree. The task grew so burdensome the couple used an artificial tree for several years, until their children discovered the ruse.

Carrousel, with its holiday music, hot cider and big selection solved the family’s dilemma permanently. “When we found this place she was like a kid in a candy store,” Lynn Crouse said.

The multiplicity of choices is precisely why Robin Stover, her daughter Aspen and roommate Tori Gregory couldn’t agree which tree to take back to their Spokane Valley home Sunday.

“We’ve each found three that we like,” Stover said. “It may come down to rock-paper-scissors.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo