The Tannenbaum Toss - a game the whole family can play
Spot the first discarded tree, snap a photo, and fame and fortune can be yours
This is the time of year when every news organization in the country comes out with lists of clever gifts and holiday baking recipes and ugly Christmas sweater contests to keep us all entertained until January finally rolls around.
The New York Times, in fact, just published a piece titled “54 gifts for the incredibly picky,” but I don’t know why anyone would want to give 54 gifts to a picky person in the first place.
This is also the time for my highly competitive Christmas contest known as the Tannenbaum Toss.
This contest debuted several decades ago when one of our kids spotted a bright green Christmas tree unceremoniously dumped in a Davis gutter on December 14.
Why, we wondered, as we snapped photos of the crime, would anyone spend their hard-earned cash on an 8-foot Douglas Fir, then give it the heave-ho 11 days before Santa comes down the chimney on a no-burn day?
We decided it was probably a homesick UC Davis student who bought a tree on the first day they were available - generally the Friday after Thanksgiving - put it up to bring joy during Fall Quarter finals week, then took it down and dragged it to the gutter before heading to the airport and flying home for Christmas.
Which is actually smarter than leaving it untended for three weeks, then having to deal with it when you resume your studies the first week of January when Christmas is but a distant memory.
So, rather than being accused of Grinch-like behavior, the owner of this discarded tree was probably so enamored with Christmas that the thought of not having a tree in his or her home was simply too much to bear.
Be that as it may, the image of that lonely tree, still bearing shreds of tinsel, sharing a cold and damp gutter with Davis’ famous raccoons, led some bright soul to suggest a citywide contest to identify the first such orphaned tree every December.
Or November. Or October. Or whenever.
The problem here, of course, is the prize for spotting the first disrespected tree is so sweet - think chocolate - that people are tempted to game the system by cutting a Doug Fir from an Oregon forest by dark of night in July, hauling it back to town and hiding it in the backyard until an appropriate time to trash it.
It’s a delicate balancing act, because if it goes in the gutter in July, it’s clearly suspicious, but if you wait too late into December, someone may beat you to the punch. Not to mention the prize.
All entrants must provide photographic evidence and an address where the tree is languishing.
Putting last year’s tree in the backyard and then hauling it to the street 12 months later is strictly prohibited.
The Large Judging Body - me - will not be fooled.
Our family tree is not eligible for the Tannenbaum Toss, mostly because it was humiliated the other night by toppling completely over, entirely by itself, at 3 a.m., shattering several cherished family ornaments and making a horrific mess all over the living room floor.
We are blaming our cat, Darby, who has had a love/hate relationship with this ceiling-topper of a tree ever since we put it up.
The contest is so popular that several years ago a second contest was instituted to honor the last tree into the gutter, which generally happens right around Mother’s Day.
Ladies and Gentlemen, grab your cameras.
The Tannenbaum Toss is about to begin.
Reach me at bobdunning@thewaryone.com
My mother was a life long fan of the Christmas season, and when we were kids she would insist on putting up a tree well before Thanksgiving. We lived in rural North Carolina, with an extensive pine forest just behind our house. Trees were free for the taking, and she would send us three boys off to do the taking. It was free, after all, not the $100 you might pay these days. Anyway, up the tree would go sometime in November, as early as she could persuade my father to permit it, and often so early that by early December the tree was so dry it would have to be replaced. Or hazard a fire. I would guess that my mother might well have won the Tannenbaum Toss some years, when the replacement might have happened still in November. As Archie Bunker put it "Those were the days".
Before Christmas? That’s faster than I ever have.
My ex-husband used to make Christmas a pretty stressful holiday, so I was always happy to get the tree down and be done with it. I started having a contest with myself. My earliest was 7:34 AM on December 26, 2000. We have happier times now so I will be taking mine down on the 27th this year!