Too scrawny. Not enough branches on the back side.

This one looks okay. Oh, that one would be good if I cut it about eight feet from the ground.

Now there's one ... no, one side has got practically no branches.The front looks good though. 

Maybe this one...

That's the the thoughts that went through my head as I rambled along the side of the forest service road north of Campbell River a couple of weekends back. This year it was the Menzies Mainline and I was looking for a Christmas tree.

We do this every year. I from the BC Forest Service (or whatever the acronym for the ministry that looks after B.C.'s forests is these days 91ÂãÁÄÊÓƵ“ FLOOORDNORDAMSKI or something) and highlight the roads designated as sites for harvesting trees. Is that the right word, do you harvest a Christmas Tree? Cut it down? Chop it? Certainly not chop, I use a saw. I take a bead on a tree spied from the road, attack it after stumbling through the bushes, shaking off all the recent raindrops, many of them finding the gap between my coat collar and my neck and a route down my back.

The B.C. Forest Service allows people to go out and harvest their own Christmas tree in designated areas on Crown land and my family has been doing it virtually every year since we first moved here more than 35 years ago. You used to have to go to what was called the Ministry of Forests office on Dogwood Street and pick up your permit in person. Now, like many things, you can just download it. And it still doesn't cost anything.

We like to do it because we like the idea of going out into the bush, well, along the edge of it anyways and cutting down our own tree. We do it as a family outing and it connects us to some sort of sense tradition, a kind of quintessential Canadianness. "I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay..." Sorry for that irreverent Monty Python interruption.

My wife and I both grew up in very remote places in northern Canada and there was never a shortage of Christmas trees close at hand. We never had to go very far because we lived on the edge of wilderness and we never had to buy one.

So, since moving here, we started right off the bat getting a permit and heading off to get our tree. Later, kids came along and our little family would bundle up (in rainjackets more than mittens and woolies in this wet Vancouver Island climate) and drive out usually to some road or other in the Sayward Forest and find our special tree. In a grey dreary late fall day, it is always a refreshing outing in the woods. As with any outdoor activity, it connects us with our forests, allows us to touch trees, examine them closely and critically, above all, appreciate them. Then cut one down, LOL. I confess to always feeling if not a mild quandary about the idea of cutting a living thing down then at least I spare a thought to the notion of extinguishing a living thing. 

It may not be the most environmentally-sound practice but it's also not that bad. And, in fact, I'm pretty sure the reason the forest service does it is to enact some sort of citizen tree-thinning along the side of logging roads in the area. This helps hold back the forest encroaching on the road (as they always do persistently, relentlessly in this country) and/or allow the remaining trees the space needed to grow more optimally.

It's all second growth forest, so it's no stranger to human disturbance. Not that I really think enough people do it to have a significant impact. Although, the day we went out this year I saw lots of people out doing the same thing, so maybe it does.

Another dilemma, of course, is the notion that I'm depriving a tree seller some business, often times, it's a community organization. I have a couple of years chosen to buy a tree and usually when I do it's from a charitable sale. But I support other charities 91ÂãÁÄÊÓƵ“ and businesses, for that matter 91ÂãÁÄÊÓƵ“ throughout the year so there's enough support to go around. 

The trees we get are not the coiffed, manicured and perfectly shaped Christmas tree that you get from a tree lot. The "wild trees" (they're not really wild, they're second growth in a managed forest) are usually scrawny by comparison and always a compromise. The branches aren't close enough together, the needles too sparsely dispersed. The branches reach out too far, instead of curling upwards and combining into a perfect, cone-shaped tree. We always have to settle for one that's not quite right. Think of them as, like, factory seconds, compared to plantation-grown trees.

Each year we get the tree back to our house, trim it to fit, decorate it and declare, "It's not too bad this year." We'll all nod our heads in agreement, "Yeah, it's not too bad."

In a commercial world and a holiday at times too caught up in the amassing of material perfection, i.e., getting just what we want, our less-than-perfect Christmas tree reminds us of family, health, nature, tradition and being satisfied with what we've got.

Merry Christmas everybody.