FRESH YARN presents: High Atop the Christmas Tree... by Shannon Starr

FRESH YARN presents:

High Atop the Christmas Tree
By Shannon Starr

As the holiday season approaches I can't help but fondly remember a family Christmas story from my girlish youth.

At the age of sixteen in 1975, I was the proud owner of a 1967 VW Beetle, tan with red fenders and rust spots galore, it would run forever on a hope and a prayer and 79 cent a gallon gas. One of the responsibilities of having the car was to be at my mother's beck and call whenever she needed someone to run an errand.

The weekend right before the holidays that year, she asked me to go get a Christmas tree.

We never did things like normal families, no loading into the family car and walking the lot picking and choosing our favorites. No, we needed a tree to have in the window of our house so the small town neighbors in Jonesville, Michigan would think we were a functional family unit headed by a hard-working single mom.

Mom assigned my slightly older brother, Mark, to go with me to the local tree lot half a mile away. She handed him the $10 bill bestowing upon him all the rights and responsibilities therein. With the money in his hand, symbolically she was saying he was in control, whereas I was just the method of transportation.

His first order of business, once we fought over the fact that no-way-in-hell did he get to drive my car, was to stop and pick up my friend Terri. With long dark hair, exotic looks, and rather large ta-ta's for her age, Terri was the subject of my brother's eternal crush and he used any excuse to go see her. Terri, on the other hand, used any excuse to get out of the house.

Between my brother's duplicity, and Terri's hunger for adventure and getting high, I was on the road to hell. It had not occurred to me to do anything other than my mother's bidding, but Terri and my brother came up with a different plan.

Driving through Jonesville, they decided that we wouldn't have to spend the money on a tree. We could spend it on other things, and steal a tree.

Ten dollars didn't land in a teenager's hand every day back then. The two of them figured out we could buy a couple of dollars worth of gas, two packs of Kool cigarettes, two bottles of Annie Green Springs wine, and a nickel bag of pot.

Then once we had scored, we would drive out to the country to the tree farm. We had worked there the previous summer, lured by the idea of making a whole $2 an hour trimming the trees on hot August days. For three weeks, the tree trimming season, we were covered in sap, sunburnt beyond recognition, and the owners of a new-found insight into the life of the migrant workers and their bosses.

We also knew the layout of the farm.

First, my brother figured, we had to go back to our house, park down the block while he snuck into the garage and grabbed some rope and a saw for our crime. We would then stop at his best friends house, score the pot before getting the wine, and then on the way out of town, stop for gas.

While I looked forward to becoming a one-third owner of a nickel bag of pot, and drinking the sweet elixir of cheap wine on that beautiful day, I thought about the owner of the Christmas tree farm. Crotchety and mean, he treated the poor black migrant workers like dogs yelling at them that they weren't working hard enough, and constantly pointing me out as the only female in the crew and saying, "The white girl don't complain, I don't wanna hear you!"

We also heard stories from him during our lunch breaks about how during Christmas season he kept a shotgun handy to shoot people who would come out and try to steal trees.

So there I was driving, my big brother rolling a joint, and Terri swigging out of the first bottle of wine during the ten miles of country road to the farm. We passed the bottles and the joint while we masterminded our plans, and concocted an alibi in case we ran into the law.

Since the Christmas tree farm was only a mile from my grandparents' farm, we would drop my brother off at the tree farm, where he would penetrate the depths of the two-hundred acres to stay out of sight while he played Paul Bunyan.

In the meantime, Terri and I would drive to my grandparents' house, stop in to say hi and then leave ten minutes later, thus establishing our alibi for being in the area if the local sheriff happened upon us driving away with the tree strapped to the top of my car. "Why, we got if from our grandparents' farm, Officer."

I stopped the car, and my brother scampered off into the trees, saw in hand.

By the time Terri and I got to my grandparents' farm, we had reached a nice level of glow-on, and had inhaled enough of the marijuana to have altered the time-space continuum. By this I mean, once Terri and I wandered into the kitchen, which was filled with the warm scents of holiday cooking, we forgot about my brother.

I found out later that while we feasted, Mark searched for a tree. But without the decent coat, warm boots and gloves that he was too cool to wear, he started getting cold. Frustrated and tired, he started sawing away at whatever tree he was in front of. Working in the snow, and freezing his nuts off, my brother realized he had picked an old rusty and dull saw. He worked that saw until he could stand it no more and then kicked the tree over the rest of the way.

Dragging the tree back to the road, my brother cursed himself for going so far into the farm as he did. He knew he was late for the rendezvous with us, and he started getting paranoid.

And there Terri and I were, sitting in my grandmother's kitchen, being plied with all sorts of goodies, giggling at the fact granny had no idea we were high. Everything she said was funny. That is until she asked how Mark was doing.

Our eyes got as big as saucers and Terri and I took off like our asses were filled with firecrackers. Now we were paranoid about how long we had been gone. A half-hour? An hour? Two?

Upon arriving at the rendezvous site, we were greeted by my very angry and stoned brother dragging a huge Christmas tree.

We had to move fast, but unfortunately we were unable to work as a team. Paranoid about getting caught, Terri and I were of no use to my brother loading the tree onto the roof of the car. We grabbed the rope and started wrapping it around the tree, then through the windows of my Bug, expecting at any moment to hear the sound of the Christmas tree farmer as he slid a shell into the chamber of his shotgun. The more we hurried, the more it seemed we were moving in slow motion.

We were also suffering from snow blindness. The brilliance of the bright winter sun and blue sky did not help our dilated pupils, and we had to continually blink our eyes to see to tie knots with the rough inch thick rope. There must have been a hundred feet of rope but we were too stoned to realize we did not have to use it all

My brother and I began arguing who would drive home, he saw himself as the better get-away driver. But I insisted that since it was my car, only I got to drive it. We both reached for the door handle and pulled. It opened an inch and then stopped. In our hurry to tie the tree on we had tied all the doors shut. The windows were only down three-fourths of the way so we had to reach in and crank them down. We each climbed in head first, my brother managing to get into the driver's seat. He refused to budge. We were Cheech and Chong meets The Three Stooges. Off we drove, triumphant that we had pulled the heist off and not gotten caught.

…Until we got home.

As we drove up to the house, not quite ready to assume a straight face, my mother stormed out slamming the door behind her.

"Why have you been gone almost four hours, it should have only taken 30 minutes?" She demanded an answer.

This was a development we had not considered. With my brother tap dancing around, hemming and hawing, and Terri telling my mom how pretty she looked, we made up some stupid story I don't remember now, and presented the tree to my mom.

I had not taken a good look at the tree my brother had selected, trusting that his expertise in Christmas trees from the previous summer would enable him to pick out a good one.

The specimen before my mother was bare, no needles at all on one side. The other side had the long needles of a fir, and not the short needles of the better spruce. The limbs were not symmetrical, and the base of the tree was all splintered.

Angry at the tree lot man for taking advantage of kids, my mom instructed us to load the tree onto the car again. "We'll all go back, and I'll make him give us a better tree, or refund my ten dollars," She said.

We begged and pleaded knowing that once there, the jig would be up, and there would be hell to pay. We told her how we walked the lot and picked the tree special because it reminded us of the story we watched when we were little kids -- A Charlie Brown Christmas -- and how it was one of the last trees left, and surely not going to have a home unless we took it.

My mother was a tough nut to crack but as we told her of the ugly, unwanted tree and how we knew she was the only mom cool enough to accept it into her home, her heart was melted by her thoughtful children. By the time my brother and Terri were done I'm surprised she didn't go inside and bake us cookies, and make hot chocolate with little marshmallows.

Mark leveled off the bottom and stuck the tree in the base with some water; I went and took a nap. Terri managed to leave with the nickel bag stuffed down the front of her jeans, and we didn't see her for a couple of weeks.

A few years later we confessed the whole thing over Christmas dinner to my mom who, with the wisdom of age, and glass of wine or two, laughed at the whole thing.

And every year since then, Mom has told the story to whatever friends or family we are gathered with -- the story of her two stupid, stoner kids stealing a Christmas tree. God bless us every one.

[Author's Footnote: A couple of years ago I wrote this true story into a screenplay that made the rounds in Hollywood. About a year later my mom called and said she saw it in an episode of That '70s Show.=)]