It’s a tradition now – mark your calendar! The weekend after New Year’s, we all bring our dead, dry trees up to a spot in the National Forest, just off the road, halfway up to the Pajarito ski area. The location might vary just a bit (closer or farther up the same road), but it has always been on the left (south side), and we’ve always been close enough to the road that you’ll see the fire as you’re driving up. It will be easy to find us… who else would be partying it up out in the snowy woods in the dark with young children in the middle of winter in the national forest up outside of our little town?
Two years ago, I drove up by myself early in the afternoon, to find a good spot and to dig out a fire ring location (complete with snowy benches for seating, if it’s a good snow year). Sometimes you can drive off the road a bit, sometimes the snow is too deep.
Anyway, I’m off the road a hundred yards, unstrapping two trees from the roof (one was ours; one I picked up off the curb from in front of someone’s house, on the way), and a ranger pulls up. I’m thinking, “uhhh…”. So he gives me a dubious look up and down and then asks, “Are you dumping those in the woods?”. And I respond, “no… we’re planning on having a big bonfire up here with a bunch of people and burning all our trees in an hour or so…”
So he looks at me all serious for about five seconds, then says “Oh, ok then.” And drives off.
In that moment I felt quite proud of our town and lucky to be raising my kids here.
Partially, this post is advertising—anybody who reads this and would be the type to bring their family into the dark cold snowy woods to burn their Christmas tree with us—well we would love for you to come participate. We’ve had as few as four or five people join us, and I think we topped out around 30 friends once. Frankly, we don’t care whether you have a tree or not, there will already be plenty of those. Our regulars will browse their neighborhood and pick up trees on the way up. Several friends purposely stop watering their trees after Christmas to prepare for drying them out.
Basically it’s an excuse to have a social campfire in the middle of the winter, when it can otherwise be quite hard to get people motivated to get outside.
Generally, mid-winter is one of the few dependably fire-safe times of year. Last year, unfortunately, it was so dry we only had a campfire but didn’t bother with the trees. This year it looks like we’re good to go, and there should be snow on the ground besides.
Boy, do those dry Christmas trees go up like gangbusters. You can really tell who cut theirs from the woods and kept it watered, versus those that bought theirs off a lot and couldn’t reach under the tree with the pitcher of water because it was too perfect and dense to reach the stand underneath. It can be one hell of a conflagration, let me tell you. We do a usual boring campfire for a few hours before doing the trees, because the tree burning itself has a way of commanding attention.
It’s also a great way to metaphorically put the previous year behind and move on to the next. At some point in the evening we go around the circle, each sharing one thing that we’re glad to leave behind, and one thing we’re looking forward to.
