sapin de noel

We decided to dispose of our Christmas tree in the dead of night on New Year’s Eve. It had done as valiant a job as could have been expected of a last-of-the-lot, discounted tree in the face of a toddler, a dog, and a fiercely radiator-heated apartment. When the grocery store clerk sold me on the tree – no doubt spotting my eye for an end of season bargain – he was quick to praise its olfactory benefits (oh, madame, il sentira comme la fôret! – oh, madame, it will smell like the forest!), while glossing over its probable life span in our home. When I asked him if it were likely to last until Christmas – at the time it was about a week before – he glanced nervously at G in his stroller and pronounced, “Quinze jours, bien sur.” Fifteen days.

He was right about the smell, anyway – every needle that dropped, in profusion, on our living room floor smelled wonderfully of pine and frost and the outdoors, the poor tree’s last gasp of its origins. In Paris, most Christmas trees are sold at the florist, wrapped up tightly in netting to give the appearance of a tall, skinny mummy. I find it charming that you can buy a Christmas tree at the florist, though I guess it’s really just the city version of a garden shop, but it’s an expensive charm in our neighborhood, especially, and so we took advantage of the large, American-style supermarket down the street with its bank of less delicately netted, but much cheaper, trees. My mother-in-law was still here with us, bless her, and I was suffering a bout of decidedly unromantic sciatica, so anyone strolling the rue des Belles Feuilles around three o’ clock a week before Christmas was treated to the vision of the small parade of me pushing G in his stroller at a glacial pace with my mother-in-law trailing behind us, hoisting the tree, like the cut-rate version of Birnam Wood, bewaring the ides of December. It’s hard to express the depths of my shame.

Clunking along with the stroller was a hanging plastic bag holding the buche, a flat piece of log with a hole gouged in it for the whittled end of the tree to be fitted into. Now, I’m sure that there is some methodology of tree preservation that goes along with the log – it’s certainly prettier, and a lot less sloshy, than the metal Christmas tree stands I’m used to, and it goes up with a lot less swearing. But short of spritzing the branches with mineral water and hope, I’m honestly not sure what it is. Our tree turned out to be the sensitive sort, and if you so much as looked at it unkindly it released a dark shower of needles shivering to the floor. By Christmas Day it was a bit unsightly, and by New Year’s it had passed on to disreputable. It was so dry I was sure that anyone drinking a glass of brandy in its vicinity would produce enough fumes to send it, and us, up in flames. So when S said, “It’s time,” I was happy to divest the tree of its few garlands and tin foil star in preparation for the disposal.

I had wondered, privately, how we would ever get the thing out of doors and out of our apartment without releasing a drift of needles that would risk alienating all of our neighbors and the gardienne. But S had already thought this through. “I’m just going to open the window and drop it out,” he told me.

Now, we live only on the second story, but even that short drop bears the appreciable risk of being over a narrow sidewalk with parked cars to one side and large plate-glass shop windows to the other – neither a good option for breaking the fall of a used Christmas tree, not to mention how you might explain that, in French, to an insurance agency. We considered for a moment what would be the best angle of descent, and finally decided it would be safest to remove the buche from the bottom of the tree rather than to depend on it as ballast. We waited until G was in bed, opened the window, and did a quick check for passersby before S squatted on the sill and hurled our tree into oblivion. Then he leashed up Lucy and took her with him to drag the tree over to the unofficial “dumping spot” down the street (I suppose the theory was that Lucy could defend him against any well-meaning citizen who might yell at him for improperly disposing of holiday waste).

By the time they came back inside, I had swept up a pile of needles big enough to fill a decent-sized, fragrant pillow. “Oh, my God,” S said, looking at it. “When I dropped the tree out the window, it lost the rest of its needles. I mean, every single one. What I dragged over to dump was nothing but a bare branch.” For some reason, this struck me as completely hilarious – what other kind of tree would we manage to buy in Paris than one that would wind up naked, lying on a dump, well before Epiphany? – and I started laughing helplessly. The next morning, out with Lucy, I would see a legion of dumped trees of varying sizes, all lush with needles and in much better shape than our tree had been even when I bought it (our own bare tree had been moved, for unknown reasons, and by an anonymous reveler, to rest gently against the side of a parked car).

In the meantime, after we swept up, we did manage to wake up G in time to walk over to the Eiffel Tower in time to ring in the New Year with a cast of thousands. In addition to the twinkle, there were a lot of noisemakers, champagne in plastic glasses, and homemade fireworks – an altogether satisfying experience for a small boy. When we got home, he didn’t even notice that the tree was gone.

*this really is our tree. I was not kidding.