Gardening: Fir-scented memories of working the Christmas tree lines

The debate between real Christmas trees and artificial ones has been going on for decades. Artificial because they are easy and reusable. Real because well, they are real and fill the house with a delightful scent. I happen to fall into the live tree camp not because I like them but because I grew up with them.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Shelton, Washington, called itself the Christmas tree capital of the world. Each year, millions of trees were cut from natural tree plantations, packed and shipped all over the globe. Every year we knew it was Christmas tree season when the train cars started backing up on the rail sidings.

In those days, Shelton was a logging town of about 5,000 people and its economy revolved around logging in the nearby Olympic National Forest. However, for about eight weeks each year, it revolved around the harvesting of Christmas trees. The trees were cut from logged over land that had been naturally reseeded by a few tall seed trees. The nutrient-poor glacial soil stunted seedling growth that, in eight to 10 years, produced densely branched trees. Most of these natural plantations have been replaced by huge plantations that are easier to manage.

Harvest started in late October after a hard frost set the needles, so they didn’t drop off the tree, and ran until mid-December. The trees were cut and hauled to the packing yards where workers sorted the trees by size. They were compacted with netting and packed into the long rows of rail cars standing on nearby sidings waiting to take the trees to market.

The short harvest time was a boon for many Shelton residents looking for part-time work to earn extra money for Christmas and the winter beyond. I joined their ranks in the fall of 1973 after graduating from college in the middle of a recession. We’d show up for work, rain or shine but mostly in rain in yellow slickers that sort of kept us dry. Lunch break was a steamy affair with wet rain gear drying around a wood stove. Our conversations circled around what people were going to do with their earnings and the details of life in a small town. If I correctly remember we were paid around $1.60 an hour.

We wrestled trees off the conveyor belts and bunched them into groups by size before sending them down the belt to the packers. The trees were always wet, and the big ones were heavy and slippery. It was demanding work, but we always went home smelling like fir trees.

The one benefit we were given was that we could pick out one tree to take home. The one I picked was a monster, a huge, dense Douglas fir more than 6 feet across at the base. It took a borrowed truck to haul it home only to find out it was too big for the living room. Thus, the tree that year lived on the porch looking into the living room.

Merry Christmas.