A challenging but beautifully rewarding Christmas tradition starts with a visit to Maple Ridge's Alouette Tree Farm

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      If nothing else, it’s been a year for breaking with traditions. Remember how for years you’d toodle off to the store with nothing but a smile on your face and a mental note that no one needs nine garbage bag-sized bags of Cheetos in the house? And how now you don’t leave home without your custom-printed California Golden Seals facemask and the incapacitating fear you’re putting your life in danger for a yeast run?

      Or how the purchasing of the first Avalon Dairy Eggnog bottle was once a sacred ritual? But now, with endless hours of time to kill in lockdown, you’ve shifted to whipping up gallons upon gallons of eggnog from scratch, thanking Alton Brown for a recipe that’s the best thing this side of Aubrey Plaza in Happiest Season. Goodbye Avalon, it was great to know you.

      So this year seemed like as good as any to break with one of my most time-honoured Christmas traditions of all: standing in the parking lot of the Great Canadian Superstore on Grandview spending three hours looking for the perfect $39.99 tree. And then driving a half-dozen blocks west to Lowes to see if they have a better $39.99 tree. And then driving back to Superstore 23 kilometres over the speed limit desperately praying to Kris Kringle that the tree I should have just bought in the first place isn't strapped to someone’s East Van fixie.

      Festive, right? And memorable for all the wrong reasons, including that the ritual serves as yearly proof that obsessive compulsive disorder is truly a horrible thing. Unless, that is, it leads to you getting the perfect tree.

      And getting the perfect tree is doubly challenging in 2020.

      Looking for something to brighten up what's been, as they say in Turky, a Çöp kutusu Ateş of a year, Vancouverites have started celebrating the season mega-early. Walk the streets of East Van and folks are not only spinning Elvis Presley's seasonal favourite "In the Ghetto" but also Burl Ives, the Good Lovelies, and the essential  I'll Stay 'Til After Christmas. Outdoor lights have been aglow since mid-November, and family Xmas-movie-watching—Black Christmas, Silent Night, Deadly Night, and Bad Santa— is now in full effect. 

      Most importantly, trees are already up in many homes, making things stressful if you don't have one. The word is there's a shortage this year, with travel restrictions caused by COVID-19 playing a big part in that. And that's scary, because to make the hell of 2020 a little less hellish, this year has been all about getting the perfect tree.

      And that meant changing things up with a first-ever visit to a Christmas tree farm. The big benefit of a tree farm, besides being able to lose yourself in a refreshingly rural setting for a couple of hours? Trees last longer—as in the entire Xmas season—when they've been freshly cut. 

      We chose Alouette Tree Farm in Maple Ridge on the recommendation of a guy we’ll call Bob K. (Actually, scratch that; to protect his identity, let’s refer to him as B. Kronbauer. You might know him as the guy who beat me up in a contest to become Avalon Dairy's official Eggnog Ambassador a couple of years back, but I'm trying to get over that.) 

      The idea of heading out into the great outdoors, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation-style with a Husqvarna 3120 XP chainsaw loaded into the back of the circa-’86 wood-pannelled station wagon, was important for a couple of reasons.

      First off, despite COVID-19, four out of five Dr. Bonnie Henrys suggest that it’s a good idea to get out of the house at least one a month. (Although it’s important to note, as I keep telling my roommate, that’s just a suggestion.)

      More appealling was not spending 4.5 hours looking for the perfect tree at Superstore during a pandemic, knowing that will include two side trips to Lowes.

      To somewhat approximate the opening scenes of Christmas Vacation, we borrowed a couple of kids to put in the back seat, both of whom steadfastly refused to dress for the occasion. Unless, that is, one’s idea of appropriately festive attire is a Mickey’s Big Mouth hoodie, knockoff Apple AirPods, and flip-flops.

      And so, after braving Highway 1, during rush hour, and making our way to idyllic Maple Ridge country roads listening to the Christmas classics of Sufjan Stevens, Bing Crosby, and Fear, we arrived at Alouette to cut down our own tree. 

      From the vintage red pickup truck to the old-timey shed where you pick up your Swedish saw, the place is not only as adorable as a circa-1950s Christmas card, it smells fantastically like, well, Xmas. Though it's only 45 minutes from the city, the spot feels like a world away from civilization, including a quaint farmhouse. The minute you step into the mossy field, you smell evergreen and hear birds and chipmunks chirping away. 

      The process is pretty simple, even if you don’t know who Paul Bunyan is. The friendly Robinson family, which runs the place, has everything set up to make it easy for you, pointing you to the rustic shed, and then in the direction of the trees. And then you spend the next six hours combing the field for the perfect Grand Fir, convinced that, even though you've found one that's perfect, you'll eventually find one even more perfect. 

      A couple of things to keep in mind for your trip. First of all, getting a teenager out of the car to help is mission impossible until you disable their data plan. Once in the field, you have about 12.3 minutes before they start complaining their feet are cold and they retreat to the car, which means you’re pretty much on your own. Which is great, because at this point in the pandemic, let's face it, the best gift a person can get is silence in an idyllic setting. 

      Still, the key words there are “pretty much”—because once you get down on the ground and start sawing, you're going to need someone to angle the tree so the blade doesn’t pinch. That’s an adventure if you and your roommate have spent the past few months squabbling over dishwasher duties, which way the toilet paper goes on the toilet paper roll, or what kind of sceaming moron puts underwear and dishcloths in the same laundry load. But persevere and you’ll be rewarded with a tree magnificent enough to make you glad you've made the trek. 

      Then the last part of the adventure starts.

      The weird thing about having an entire field of fresh and redolently fragrant trees to choose from is that your needs get skewed. This will make sense if you’ve ever been TV shopping at Fred Meyer in Bellingham. You go in looking for a 32-inch flat screen, but that looks puny compared to the 46-inch flatscreen two televisions over. And then, just when you’ve talked yourself into pulling the trigger on the 46-inch TV, all you can do is think about how it looks miniscule next to the 120-inch one hanging on the wall.

      That’s what happened with our fantastic Grand fir, which we realized, after carrying it to the station wagon, was almost as big as the car. Cue a three-person lift operation (someone’s "footskis" were still too cold to get out of the car) and 40 minutes figuring out how to tie the world's most perfect Christmas tree to the roof rack so it didn’t fly off into traffic on the trip back to East Van. (Pro tip-bring bungies). 

      Mission there accomplished, although that did require driving home at 36 kilometres per hour in the fast lane on Highway 1 with the hazards going, and we caused a major traffic incident trying to enter the height-restricted T &T Supermarket parkade after getting back to the ghetto and deciding to pick up takeout.

      Thanks to COVID-19, tree-cutting trips to Alouette Farm look a little different this year.

      Still, it was a wonderfully seasonal adventure, and that’s kept people going to Alouette Tree Farm since it opened in 1995.

      “We saw that there was a need for a place where you could get a Christmas experience, as opposed to going to Ikea or Save-On Foods and getting a $19 scrawny tree,” owner Wes Robinson says, interviewed from the farm.

      Flashing back to the beginnings of Alouette Tree Farm, step one was planting seedlings in 1988. And then it was a matter of waiting seven years for the trees to be mature enough for harvesting.

      Right from the start, the goal was to have a family operation—helping run things today is Robinson’s daughter Janelle and her kids.

      “We’ve had zero interest in wholesaling trees,” Robinson says. “To take our trees and sell them to a big-box store is something we’re very opposed to. This isn’t my main job—I’m retired now, but for years I did something else. But we’ve always wanted to have a family-operated Christmas tree farm operating on this property. And we expect to do that for as long as we possibly can. And we expect to be carrying on for a while.”

      This year started out like many others, with the family members planting somewhere between 500 and 1,000 seedlings in the spring for future years. And then the world changed, making this Christmas season something of a challenge. Thanks to COVID-19, Alouette has had to place restrictions on the numbers of folks who’d be allowed on site to cut down their own trees.

      “It just about caused us not to open at all this year,” Robinson admits. “The whole dynamic here had to change. People normally come to mingle around a fire and enjoy free drinks. Now there’s no free drinks and no mingling, and don’t be close to anyone out of your family circle.”

      When the farm first opened back in ’95 it sold around 50 trees, and gave away around the same amount.

      “We didn’t know if it was going to fly, so we told friends ‘Come on down, grab yourself a free hotdog, and get yourself a tree,’” Robinson recalls. “I think we sold them for around 15 bucks.”

      Today, a tree costs $55 with taxes all in. A big advantage is that they last longer than ones you tend to find at big-box stores and on lots.

      Those Christmas trees tend to come from Eastern Canada, where they are cut in early November and then shipped across the country in refrigerated trucks.

      “In my experience, by the middle of December, two weeks before Christmas, they’re just not looking fresh anymore,” Robinson says. “That creates a negative experience. We guarantee fresh, because you cut it yourself.”

      Robinson notes that I’m not the only one who’s arrived on site, and then been instantly paralyzed by indecision.

      “People come here and then they don’t choose a tree until they’ve walked the entire site,” he says with a laugh. “They’ll spend 45 minutes with the family in tow, looking at every tree, and then likely go back and settle on the first one that they identified as their potential tree. So your reaction was not unusual at all—it’s really typical.”

      No word, however, on how typical it is for an Alouette visitor to get the tree home and then discover there’s a problem. Namely, the the tree is so majestically big that it won’t fit in the living room.

      That required moving the sofa onto the back porch, where a goddamn family of raccoons keeps taking up residence each night. They’re probably fleabitten, and possibly rabid, but they’re also undeniably cute—to the point where they spend a good hour or two each night scratching on the door for a better look at the most stunning Christmas tree in the entire village of East Vancouver. And begging for more eggs, orange peels, and sumac-rosemary-sourdough bread crusts.

      Consider it part of the start of a beautiful new tradition. 

      The tree.
      Mike Usinger

       

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