Among the many pieces of wisdom I've gathered in my travels are such gems as, "Pop Tarts make excellent survival food," "nothing spells relief like morphine," "no expensive therapy could have better prepared Charlie Brown for life than Lucy and her football," and "the Universe responds to us (usually with humor, concern for our personal development and malice.)" This last item can be illustrated by our adventure for today.

It seems that having announced to all and sundry that I had more or less washed my hands of the whole Christmas thing and found peace and serenity in so doing, it fell to me to fix the Christmas tree at the Yakutat Police Department.

I should mention that I'm filling in at the PD this week for the regular dispatcher who is off visiting family for the Holidays. Just before she left, the police Christmas tree attempted a jailbreak, lunging out of its festive plastic holder, flopping against the front window and hurling its decorations to the floor- presumably to make it harder to identify if it got as far as the forest.

This distasteful situation came about as so often happens in rural Alaska, because of local residents' insistence upon using wild Christmas trees. Wild Christmas trees resemble domesticated trees such as are used in most of the rest of the country in say, the same way a Tea Cup Poodle resembles a pack of rabid wolves. (Rabid wolves are frequently eliminated from nature in Alaska by the consequences of "marking their territory" on a wild Christmas tree. The specific details do not bear disclosure in an article that might be read by children.)

Now we all grew up with Holiday episodes of favorite family oriented television shows depicting hardy pioneer families harvesting wild Christmas trees decades before the practice was introduced from Europe. (In Europe the harvesting of wild trees is generally much safer for a variety of reasons. For instance the typical wild French Christmas tree has about the same fighting spirit as a wilted sprig of sweet basil.)

Sadly, television shows typically show a highly edited version of frontier life. The charming family living in the log cabin," are never shown butchering livestock, digging out new outhouses, filling in old outhouses, gathering buffalo chips (if you think that "buffalo chips" are a snack item, please see me after class for remedial instruction,) or tending to psychotic Cousin Alice who lives in the root cellar. They are certainly not going to show you an hour long ordeal as "Pa," spurting blood from dozens of needle wounds, wrestles a vicious wild Christmas tree to the ground, chops its roots off and drags it back to that cabin so that they family can celebrate a tradition that they've never heard of.

But I don't live in a television show. I must deal daily with harsh Alaskan reality: sub-arctic weather, bears in the streets, eighteen-hour nights, and the voices in my head. Thus the snarling tree I had to deal with was no wispy, lacy evergreen confection from Wal-Mart. This was a feral member of the Spruce family, a wild Alaska Christmas tree.

To those of you fortunate enough to have never encountered one of these apex predators of the Vegetable Kingdom, a short list of common misconceptions might be instructive.

Misconception #1: the term "needles" used to describe the leaves of such trees is poetic imagery.

Fact: Emphatically not! They are needles- sharp, hard, flesh piercing needles.

Misconception #2: Wild Christmas Trees are shaped somewhat like domestic Christmas trees.

Fact: Wild Alaskan Christmas trees came in a variety of shapes such as partial cube, partial sphere and asymmetrical tumbleweedic, but never even vaguely conical.

Misconception #3: A Wild Christmas tree cannot shed more needles than it had when it was brought indoors.

Fact: Science has yet to offer an explanation for this phenomenon, but these cellulose factories of crippling injury shed approximately six time as many needles as they bear when brought indoors.

So today I, who had found refuge in ignoring the whole Christmas experience was given the assignment of wrestling a feral tree into an upright position and lifting it into a new holder, and replacing the glass ornaments and candy canes that it had throw off in disgust during the night. Fa-la-la.


Eventually, I enlisted the help of one of the officers who announced his need for a heavy coat and gloves before approaching the tree. Interestingly, he had no such concerns when I was sent scrabbling under the tree to clamp it into the new holder. Maybe my squeals of pain increased his safety consciousness.

I was proud of the fact that I got hardly any blood on the radio mike at all, though a fair amount on my trouser leg.

After half an hour or so of manhandling the tree proper, and another half hour or so a vacuuming fifteen or twenty pounds of needles, some of which now had festive red tips, it was time to deal with the glass ornaments.

So, I perforce had to deal with yet another Christmas tradition, namely the broken shards of razor thin glass all over the desk and in the paperwork tradition.

As I said above, the Universe responds to us, much like some cosmic circus clown with a custard pie. I made peace with my non-participation in the Christmas Traditions, and "splop!" I get a pie pan full of traditions right in the face. Where was Lucy when I was in my formative years?