Frost’s Christmas trees: Pricing out the priceless

If you haven’t read “Christmas Trees” by Robert Frost, it’s time. Here you are. It won’t take long, and then you’ll have it.

But not “have” in the manner that the poem cautions against—that having that takes too much and gets too little out of it, somehow. This is nothing less than the problem of profusion that plagues the Christmas calendar, which piles on in Advent instead of stripping down to a basic beauty to reconnect with a redeemed world.

“Christmas Trees” is a free verse poem—though often called a “playet”—written in 1916 and included in the collection Mountain Interval. In a wintry Vermont scene flanked by fir trees, Frost establishes the tension between rural and urban life. A city man drives up with an offer to buy the country man’s trees as Christmas trees. The farmer coyly entertains the offer, though he feels sheepish that his trees might find out. But he feels certain how sad it would be to see the hillside laid bare without that evergreen cluster, like some sort of village “Where houses all are churches and have spires.”

Robert Frost is a charming old curmudgeon, with an eye that sees as deeply as it’s set. He wonders in his crisp yet crusty way if, perhaps, the best Christmas trees might be the ones that stay out living on snowy hillsides, pointing to heaven with their peaks, and not the ones sold “off their feet to go in cars.” And that, for all the dollars and cents passing from pocket to pocket, the best Christmas gifts are those unsullied by any scrap of silver or gold.

The imagination of the farmer is very present as the narrator, and he animates the question of whether his fir balsams could be Christmas trees with a rustic whimsy. He is real, with squinty eyes and sandpaper hands; somehow not like the matter-of-fact salesman, who is as distant as the city he is a son of, on a mission to claim yet another piece of the country for the slowly encroaching empire. In the seasonal fashion to bring what belongs outside inside as a decoration, the salesman offers the measly price of thirty cents per tree. Half amused and half offended, the farmer turns him down, glad that his trees will not be cut down and carted off.

This is a simple, straightforward poem with a simple, straightforward sentiment—the kind that is often forgotten and in need of being brought up, especially at Christmas. Christmas is not for appropriation, but rather appreciation, to regard things as gifts that demand no business dealings from anyone, like trees on a hill, and to give in that profusion that cannot be valued in dollars and cents. The poem makes its point by creating a contrast between the city worldview and the country worldview, showing that a care for the way things are should, perhaps, take precedence over the way we might like them to be.

And that—again, perhaps—the way they are might be the way we might like them to be—remembering Frost’s prayer in “Two Tramps in Mud Time”: “My object in living is to unite/My avocation and my vocation.” The world is good and for our use, but some things should be let be in order to give the book of the world a voice in the works of mankind. Christmas is a time to see the world that God made good—for, after all, God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son. Christmas is when heaven came to earth to pay the price for sin. It isn’t when earth comes to heaven and asks the going rate for some priceless thing.

Advent invites us to remember just this: how God made the world compares to what we have made of the world. Mankind needs incarnational things as much as it needs the Incarnation, but the concentration on the loud accoutrements of Christmas has obscured a silent actuality. Advent is a time of divesting instead of investing, a repentant time of giving things that come at the best kind of cost—the gift of ourselves instead of our savings. There is a pricelessness in penance, and the poet’s vision of a sacred world is one that the Christmas pound-of-flesh can never match.

Of course, the proverbial commercialism has pushed itself into every corner of Christmas to sell the perfect pie to every little Jack Horner. “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers” says Wordsworth and so is the trend that all but lays Christmas to waste year in and year out. The impulse to present is fueled by love and goodwill between man and man, but the pressure to procure is the polar opposite of peace.

Frost knew the pain of that pressure. He once told his friend Arthur Bleau that, at a hardscrabble time when he struggled to make ends meet as a sometimes-farmer, sometimes-poet, and sometimes-professor, he loaded some belongings into a sleigh and hauled them to market to sell to have money for Christmas presents for his children. He failed to sell anything, and as he drove slowly home, dejected, discouraged, and despairing at the prospect of having no means of giving his children gifts, he stopped by woods and, in his words, “sat there and bawled like a baby.” His horse’s harness bells brought him back to himself and the snowy evening and on he went, with promises to keep and miles to go before he could sleep.

A great poem came from that moment of Christmas heartache, a heartache born of the glitzy guilt-trip regarding the quality and quantity of presents under the Christmas tree. Mariah Carey can warble “all I want for Christmas is you” all she wants over the store speakers, but we could all use some kind of Grinch to take away the trimmings and trappings and leave us with ourselves and the world that God made good enough to save. There is a gross valuation in the curse of “stuff” that interferes in the purity of Christmas when families ought to rejoice in their familyhood without feeling the scales of secular humanism and consumerism.

The Christmas crisis is that we have begun to attach too much value on priceable goods and not enough value on priceless goods. It is the sickness of Scrooge that turned away from the fortune of Mr. Fezziwig’s power to render people happy or unhappy by words and looks, “in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up.” Gain is too great a false god. We are, thankfully, in position to become O. Henry’s foolish couple who grew as wise as Magi through futile Christmas presents—a watch chain bought with hair for a watch sold to buy hair combs. All they were left with was the gift of the intention to give. And the revelation of the importance of that gift, that gift outright, could be a poem like “Christmas Trees.”

Now, this is not a poem against Christmas trees—but Christmas trees stand as a good example of how the financial has tainted the cultural. The Christmas tree is just one of the obligations of the modern Christmas melee, in which prices and proceeds have become predominant concerns. “The trial by market everything must come to” comes with a vengeance at Christmas, and with the dawn of Black Friday every human relationship is drawn into that trial, where we can say, as perfectly parodied in The Office by Michael Scott with all sincerity, Santa hat on head, “Hey man, I love you this many dollars’ worth.” The farmer would spare his trees from that holiday slave bazaar “beyond the time of profitable growth”; he values his trees beyond what they might be sold and resold for.

Christmas is, of course, about giving, not buying and selling—though there is a “simple calculation” that Frost leaves us with, which poses a complicated paradox with a wry smile. He concludes that the thousand Christmas trees he didn’t know he had are “Worth three cents more to give away than sell,” as in, he would gladly pay the three cents for the stamp to post one of his good Christmas trees as a gift to everyone on his Christmas letter list. There is a big difference between making a profit and making a present—and it makes all the difference.

Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

Catholic World Report