If you’re feeling energetic, you can get a permit from the USFS, drive for miles, cut your very own tagged Christmas tree, and maybe get stuck on a back road or frostbitten. We still have folks with sentimental feelings about this tradition, but take another look at National Lampoon’s old movie “Christmas Vacation” before you decide to try it. 

My own feeling is that trees growing in a forest, park, or someone’s yard are so welcome that I hate to see them cut down unless experts like the Forest Service or an arboreal committee says the trees need thinning, are sick, or create some other problem like being invasive, even if I happen to like some of those, too.    

All in all, tree lovers like me are glad to know that the evergreens sold in lots and at grocery stores have not been chopped down in forests but are grown like other crops on tree farms. Growers plant them, tend them, harvest them, ship them to market, and earn a living or supplement theirs that way.

Buyers still can bring a Christmas tree home, enjoy a week or so of festivities, and, after the holiday season grind it up to make mulch, something still beneficial. An even easier route to go is to get last year’s artificial tree. Research tells us that 27.4 million real trees were purchased last year in this country, compared to 21.1 million artificial ones. I am learning to like the fakes, although they can be expensive if they are good ones. Besides, you can choose whichever color, green or white, best suits your décor, and one tree can last for years. Compared to reducing a live tree in a forest to a stump, an artificial tree manufactured in a factory seems like a nice substitute.

Betwixt the devastation caused by fires, insects, and drought, forests are having a hard enough time, without chopping down more trees for a couple of weeks of personal pleasure, not to mention the wildlife that live in forest. The giants that are sacrificed for festivities like Rockefeller Center make me feel sick. To me, it seems ironic that this year’s lighting of the tree on the White House lawn with its weird illumination looked like a fake instead of a live tree.

There was a time when the idea of forest management was nil or low on the totem pole. Many forests would have disappeared completely if forest reserves and the U.S. Forest Service had not been created in the nick of time to begin some management. 

Trees are necessities, not just optional ornaments. Prehistoric people and Native Americans used wood for essential utilitarian purposes, like cooking, staying warm, and making tools. When Americans moved West into the vast unsettled continent, forests were still so abundant that they often were a nuisances, in the way, but wood still was a vital resource. Ask any Boy Scout.

Forests were cleared for homesteads, firewood, and farms, until newcomers reached the treeless prairies, where wood had to be hauled great distances. In the mountains trees disappeared rapidly for new cities and towns with new buildings, railroads needing ties, mines needing timbers, mills making paper, on and on. It didn’t take long for some areas to be completely denuded.

Logging was an economic asset that gave employment to lumberjacks and to workers in sawmills, along with big profits for wealthy timberland owners, until economics required changes. Clear-cutting and burning of forests in our nation and others around the world had destroyed millions and millions of acres of native trees to convert them into farmland, pineapple plantations, urban and suburban tracts, recreational playgrounds, highways and airports, or anything else except forests. Tropical countries are just waking up to the losses, often too late.

When it was almost too late, Americans also recognized the need to think about forests and their connections to issues like watersheds and water resources, sustainable agriculture, and even carbon sequestration. These get us into serious subjects, like survival.

A good beginning during the holidays would be for us to think of our Christmas trees as more than jolly, disposable decorations.