New Year's Bonfire
New Year has come and gone, and we have dutifully received directives for municipal Christmas tree removal. Many houses, unsure of the schedule, simply dumped their trees on the treebank, so that the trees will be out there whenever the truck comes by. I suppose some of my neighbors find the sight depressing, a firm reminder that the holiday has shuffled off to wherever holidays go to die. Not me.
No, I think the trees look rather pretty, even discarded on the curb. New Jersey suburban sprawl is drab at the best of times, and positively awful in the gray of winter. The trees are thoroughly dried, through inattention and dry air and sapping over the sawn trunk, so they keep the same shape they had standing in living rooms. Around here, the predominant style is short-needled, 5’ to 6’ egg-shaped trees, which, next to 12’ monsters, are my favorites. The needles remain miraculously green, possibly with some help from food coloring. They all look ready for another months service; all someone needs to do is brush them off, and stand them upright, preferably far from any heat source.
Which brings me to the real reason I like seeing all those trees: I like to imagine watching them burn.
In my youth, I assumed that all the refuse trees went to some good purpose, that the city would sell them for paper pulp, for particle boards, or for fuel, and earn a few bucks to defray taxes in the process. I was dismayed to read that the post-holiday glut forces most towns to pay someone to take them. (Can this be true? Where can I find reliable information on it?) Some trees just wind up landfill, though we may be getting better about recycling. After all, all garbage is somebody’s raw material.
But from those towns that just don’t know what to do with the things, who find scarce land taken up by annual pine deposits, I dream of receiving a letter asking me to help torch a six-story tower of Christmas trees, and reduce it to a more manageable ash. Since this is my fantasy, there is no controlled burn, where we carefully saw down every tree and feed them slowly into a furnace. The trees are just piled on top of one another, brittle dry, no water content to interfere, but full of the volatile ketones and acetones that make sap. I’d tunnel a hole into the center of the pile, where the trees’ weight would compress the pile somewhat, light a kerosene-soaked rag in there, and run. With the mouth of the tunnel facing the prevailing wind, I could get a sort of chimney effect, though the draw would be horizontal rather than vertical. Cracking and spitting, the mound of trees would burn from an inner core outward. It would look spectacular when the flames cut their way up through the center, but hadn’t yet reached the perimeter. Over the course of the next minute, the furnace would create its own draft, pulling air from every direction and funneling it skyward. No one could bear to stand within forty yards of the blaze. It would be glorious, if brief.
Locals might not show sufficient interest to buy tickets, but if the town advertised the spectacle enough to draw firebugs from a large area, I expect they could make a little money, or at least draw a little revenue from the sausage vendors and coffee stalls. It could be the small-town festival, right up there with the mushroom harvest and Lithuanian Pride Day. Whaddya say, mayors? Any takers?