Dead Trees

When I was a little kid, I was weird. Like, I mean. Everyone thinks they were weird as a child, at least a little bit. But really, I was strange as hell. I did unusual, probably unhealthy things. For instance, I liked to play Suicide Barbie, which was a game that consisted of finding the most creative ways I could think of to bring Barbie to an early demise. (Family favorite was Barbie Corvette off the top bunk.) I liked to use the encyclopedia to draw states and their counties in full detail. Also, I once got in trouble for drawing a picture of a naked woman who was peeing, except her pee was going up a straight line into her own mouth.

But that's not what we're talking about here.

Anyhow, my family moved into a beautiful house when I was five years old, and we were lucky enough to live there until I was about twelve. The house had three bedrooms, an enormous kitchen, a playroom, and - most excitingly - an epic backyard complete with large and explorable wooded area. As soon as I was old enough, I was in those woods all the time. My sisters and I would play hide and seek, or tag, or we would use one of the fallen trees as a balance beam and play gymnasts.

However, those were not the best games of all. Oh no. The best woods game started in December, even though it was far too cold to play outside just yet.

Every Christmas, my family was lucky enough to celebrate in style with a real, live Christmas tree. We would stand it up in our living room and decorate it while we listened to holiday music and drank eggnog or cider. We would pile gifts underneath it, and my sisters and I would anxiously await Christmas morning when we would finally be able to gather around the tree and open our gifts together. No matter what we received, it was always a special time of warmth and love.

In the following days and weeks, though, the tree would start to brown - and eventually, my father would dismantle our holiday display and haul the tree into the woods. It would slowly die under the snow of winter, withering away until it was merely a pile of branches and dead needles.

Spring would soon come, and the sun would do its best to break through the treetops and melt away the remnants of snow. Once all of the snow was gone and the woods were a bit drier, it was finally time for the best woods game in the land. It was time to play:

Poor people.

I know, you're already thinking, "What the hell? Poor people? That's awful." Listen, I know it is, but who cares, it was fucking awesome. There was one single rule to playing poor people, and it was this: pretend to be poor with whatever you can find in the woods. Thanks to this rule, the first game of the year was always the best.

That's right, you guessed it. The dead tree! It was time to play poor people Christmas, which was just like celebrating real Christmas all over again, except that there were no real gifts and also it was sort of disturbing. Generally, the game started with me locating the rotting pine carcass from the previous holiday season and hoisting it up against an actual living tree trunk. It would almost always sort of just sag towards the ground, and I was certain to lose a good number of needles in the process, but eventually it would stay standing! At this point, the real fun began.

Decorating Poor People Christmas tree was the highlight of my year. In December, there are boxes of glass ornaments and garland and lights to use to make things as festive as possible - but in the woods in April, all you have is your imagination and hopefully some trash. I recall using old single-serving Doritos bags, rusted beer cans, soggy newspapers, and plastic soda can rings. Decorating that tree was more important than decorating the real Christmas tree, because everything we used was creative and no one had ever used such a thing to decorate for the holidays before.

Finally, once the tree was decorated, it was time to have Poor People Christmas morning. Unfortunately, since we were supposed to be poor, we weren't allowed to give each other gifts. So, instead, my two sisters and I would stand around the tree with sad looks on our faces, and we would say things like:

"Well, maybe we'll be able to afford gifts next year."

or

"At least we have this beautiful tree that someone was careless enough to throw away into our woods."

or, my favorite,

"I know we aren't supposed to give gifts, but I got you each a rock. I know it's not much, but it's all I could manage."

And that's it. Eventually, one of us would start laughing at the absurdity of things, and then we would all collapse into fits of giggles over how ridiculous we were being. It didn't occur to us then how heartless and terrible we were being, nor does it occur to us now to feel bad about it as adults. We were children, and we were having the time of our lives. We were, of course, lucky to have a real Christmas, and gifts, and a house, and nice things.

Really though, I couldn't have asked for anything better than playing Poor People.