Holly Folly Christmas

folly: lack of good sense or normal prudence and foresight

-Merriam-Webster

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Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you’ve got

Till it’s gone

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot

-Joni Mitchell

Big Yellow Taxi

© January 7, 1970; Siquomb Publishing Corp

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Who chops down a holly tree the week before Christmas? That sounds like a joke looking for a punchline. Sadly, it’s not. I watched it happen, and there was nothing  funny about it. For me, it’s almost tragic. I loved that holly tree. Yeah, call me a tree hugger, go ahead!

Holly killers caught in the act the week before Christmas.

The tree was glorious at 40-to-50 feet, soaring toward heaven. Growing at around two feet per year, that tree had been there 20 years or more. It was a landscape cornerstone of the house across the street. For more than 10 years, the tree has been my cheery companion. Every time I stepped outside, that holly was there, a happy place in my vision. When winter came and all other green had withdrawn, the holly soldiered on, sharing its life-giving color. A holly tree can live 100 years so I believed that tree would always be with me.

The cheery holly dominating the landscape several years ago before the butchering got underway.

More importantly, the tree was symbolic of what I lost when the previous occupants of the house moved away. They were a lovely and charming family, and they had become my good friends. I wrote a paean to them when they left, Where I Have to Go. They were nurturing people, and that showed in their front yard —- the grand holly tree, another exotic, smaller tree, perhaps a maple. There were two lovely young birch trees lining the street next to the curb — magnificent Autumn color. There were flowers, many wildflowers everywhere. Contrary to all convention, they had created a vegetable garden in the front yard — and they had a compost pile where I could put coffee grounds and vegetable scraps. That is all gone now. The current occupants prefer to drive over the curb and park a pickup truck in the front yard.

Exotic flowers and a vegetable garden under the protection of a stately holly tree. This was the beauty created by the prior occupants, my friends.

They had it in for that holly tree since the beginning. When they first moved in they committed an abuse by crudely pruning nearly all the lower branches, especially the ones closest to the house. I suppose it made some sort of sense to them, but it made the tree look like it got a haircut from a first day barber school student, painful to see. I think you don’t easily kill a holly tree and so it survived, even continued to flourish. Until last weekend when three or four assassins showed up with chainsaws and a wood chipper. In two hours it was all over. What had been the most beautiful tree for blocks around was reduced to a pile of wood chips hauled off to who knows what fate.

Years of growth and beauty and a home to wildlife — counted out by a chainsaw.

The assault on nature and the beauty surrounding the house across the street began nearly as soon as my friends departed. I had a little row with a young man representing the corporate owners of the house by then. I wrote that up in Beauty and the Beast.

Myth, superstition, legend, whatever you like, says it’s bad luck to chop down a holly tree. I suspect that’s doubly so at Christmastime. Holly cut and brought inside is said to bring good luck into the home, to ward off bad spirits. And what is prettier and more iconic of Christmas than the deep green and brilliant red of a holly sprig? As a boy I loved being out in the woods on a cold winter day, Boy Scout pocket knife in hand, gathering decorative holly to bring home. Even better and more in the spirit if you had to shake off some snow. Add some fir branches and pine cones, and you had the most festive of all Christmas decorations. And maybe it brought some luck!

Pretty sunflowers on a happy afternoon — nurtured by prior occupants, and now gone forever.

I don’t wish ill luck upon the people living across the street now. However, they have made it hard to wish them, or anyone else, the good will of this holiday season. It’s the saddest Christmas I’ve had in many years.

A couple of days ago I related this tragic saga to my tree-hugging friend, Bonnie Johnstone, in California. She urged me to be one with the spirit of that now gone tree to bring some sort of good back into our world. Because of that advice, holly will come back to this neighborhood. Spring season next, I will get two large planters and put them in my driveway. Each will be a cozy home to a holly bush, one male, one female. They will have one another while the spirit of the old tree will join us. And we will all have one another. Wish us luck!

After the stump grinders did their work, all that remains of a once beautiful holly tree is a pile of woody debris.

The greenery that once was before the barbarians came.

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Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.

-Edward Abbey