came out to clear away what was left. The boxes, the broken
wreaths, the empty barrels, and our tree with one or two others
that hadn't been sold, all were thrown through the side door into
the cellar. The door was locked, and he lay there in the dark.
One of his branches, doubled under him in the fall, ached so he
thought it must be broken. "So this is Christmas," he said.
All that day it was very still in the cellar. There was an
occasional creak as one of the bruised trees tried to stretch
itself. Feet went along the pavement overhead, and there was a
booming of church bells; but everything had a slow disappointed
sound. Christmas is always a little sad, after such busy prepara
tions. The unwanted trees lay on the stone floor, watching the
furnace light flicker on a hatchet that had been left there.
The day after Christmas a man came in who wanted some green
boughs to decorate a cemetery. The grocer took the
hatchet and seized the trees without ceremony. They were
too disheartened to care. Chop, chop, chop went the blade, and
the sweet-smelling branches were carried away. The naked
trunks were thrown into a corner.
And now our tree, what was left of him, had plenty of time to
think. He no longer could feel anything, for trees feel with their
branches, but they think with their trunks. What did he think
quick tendrils of the vines climb up them, and presently they are
decorated with the red blossoms of the bean or the little blue
globes of the grape, just as pretty as any Christmas trinkets.
So one day the naked, dusty fir-poles were taken out of the
cellar, thrown into a truck with many others, and made a rattling
journey out into the land. The farmer unloaded them and was
stacking them up by the barn when his wife came out to watch him.
"There!" she said. "That's just what I want, a nice long pole
with a fork in it. Jim, put that one over there to hold up the
clothesline." It was the first time that anyone had praised our
tree, and his dried-up heart swelled with a tingle of forgotten
sap. They put him near one end of the clothesline, with his
stump close to a flower bed. The fork that had been despised for
a Christmas star was just the thing to hold up a clothesline.
It was washday, and soon the farmer's wife began bringing
out some wet garments to swing and freshen in the clean, bright
air. And the very first thing that hung near the top of the
Christmas pole was a cluster of children's stockings.
That isn't quite the end of the story, as the old fir trees whisper
it in the breeze. The Tree That Didn't Get Trimmed was so
cheerful watching the stockings and other gay little clothes that
plumped out in the wind as though waiting to be spanked that he
didn't notice what was going on or going up below him.
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lustrations by David Stone Martin, courtesy of Home & Highway Magazine
about as he grew dry and stiff? He thought that it had been silly
of him to imagine such a fine, gay career for himself, and he was
sorry for other young trees, still growing in the fresh hilly
country, who were enjoying the same fantastic dreams.
Now perhaps you don't know what happens to the trunks of
left-over Christmas trees. You could never guess. Farmers come
in from the suburbs and buy them at five cents each for bean
poles and grape arbors. So perhaps (here begins the encouraging
part of this story) they are really happier, in the end, than the
trees that get trimmed for Santa Claus. They go back into the
fresh, moist earth of spring, and when the sun grows hot the
A vine had caught hold of his trunk and was steadily twisting
upward. And one morning, when the farmer's wife came out
intending to shift him, she stopped. "Why, I mustn't move this
pole," she said. "The morning glory has run right up it." So it
had, and our bare pole was blue and crimson with color.
Something nice, the old firs believe, always happens to the
trees that don't get trimmed. They even believe that someday
one of the Christmas-tree bean poles will be the starting point
for another Magic Beanstalk, as in the fairy tale of the boy who
climbed up the bean-trae and killed the giant.
When that happrns, fairy tales will begin all over again.
Family Weekly, December 22, 1951
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