The Great Christmas Tree Caper
My mom loves pranks.
Back when I lived at home, I watched her pull them on people she loved and people she hated. The degree of meanness and inconvenience was widely variable, all the way from filling the tree in the front yard with toilet paper just for the reveal and then cleaning it up and bringing them donuts to shitting in a box and mailing it to someone, wrapped up like a nice gift.
One year, some guy had really pissed her off around Christmas. I don't know what he did but she seethed about it for weeks. She eventually came up with something she found satisfying, but she dind't explain it. She just told me to get in the car.
My mom is a Starbucks fiend, so we did that first. She gets a coffee and a big iced tea, I do the same and we're double fisting in her minivan with seven cupholders in the front. It's early January and the weather in SoCal is beautiful: bright as the Rose Parade ever promised, warm enough to hardly need a jacket.
We roll around in a neighborhood just like ours, long rows of almost identical houses and cul-de-sacs everywhere. We stop close to a house just like ours: a corner lot, with a long white fence along the adjacent street and the front door facing away.
"I put up an ad on Craigslist," my mom says airily.
I can see them already, piled up behind the fence. It's eight-foot fencing, so the pile is enormous. I don't know what they are yet.
"What did you do?" I ask her.
She sighs. "I put up an ad that said I WANT YOUR DEAD XMAS TREES. THROW THEM OVER THE FENCE ON THIS SIDE OF MY HOUSE, THIS ADDRESS. PLEASE DO NOT KNOCK ON THE DOOR OR DISTURB MY FAMILY. JUST THROW YOUR TREE OVER. THANK YOU, HAPPY NEW YEAR."
There have been three notices from our trash collection service about how trees have to be broken down so that they fit in the green waste cans. I've seen people sawing theirs apart with kitchen knives, bracing them against the ground and trying to snap their sappy trunks by stepping on them. They're a pain in the ass, Christmas trees past the holiday. Nobody wants to have to deal with them.
Now I see it. They're green and brown, short fir needles and long pine ones. Still living and long dead, piled up in this backyard, higher than the eight foot fence and showing for twenty feet. There must be two hundred of them back there, possibly more.
"Mom, what did you do?"
"I just told you." She drinks her tea in long pulls.
As we sit watching, a dude pulls up in a Camry. He opens his trunk and wrestles out a very brown, very dead Christmas tree. There's tinsel clinging to the insides of the branches. As he hauls this fire hazard up over his shoulders to hurl it over, someone comes running around the corner, from the front of the house.
"Here we go," Mom says. She's so giddy she can hardly sit still.
"I don't want your tree," yells the running guy. "Do not put it back there. Stop. Drop it."
The dude holding the tree stops, bringing it back down to rest the trunk against the ground. "Excuse me?"
The running guy stops about ten feet away, outside of tree swinging range. "I didn't make that ad," he says, panting. "I don't know who did. But I don't want all these trees. Please take it elsewhere."
The dude with the tree looks quizzically up at the pile behind the fence, then back at the homeowner. "You sure?"
"Yes," the man says, close to broken, clearly so tired.
My mom is laughing silently, pressurized like a shaken aerosol can, holding back tears.
"Ok," the dude with the tree says.
"Thank you," says the exhausted homeowner. He turns and walks away.
As soon as he's around the corner, the dude with the tree lobs it over and peels out.
My mom laughed so hard she made me drive her home.
I still wonder what that guy did to piss her off.