Arrows to Heaven by Tristi Pinkston

Excerpt from Arrows to Heaven

I’ve been the owner of the O Tannenbaum, a Christmas tree lot, for twenty years. It's the only lot in the valley that doesn’t cut their trees weeks in advance, expecting them to last through the holiday season without losing their needles. We take pride in the fact that our trees are cut the week before the lot opens, and that we cut fresh, as needed. In fact, the majority of our trees come in buckets, so the environmentally conscious can plant the tree after they’re done with it.

 Ironic. People can be so worried about the environment, but pay so little attention to why they’re buying the tree in the first place. I guess it's trendy to take care of the earth, and maybe not so trendy to talk about Who created it in the first place.

A lot of things struck me as ironic a year ago. I had reached the age where I was expected to turn into a grumpy old coot, and rather than disappoint, I'd gone with the flow. There were few men grumpier, or cootier, than myself. I was turning into a cynic, barely able to stand the holiday. Don’t get me wrong; I’m a Christian to the core. But as I get older, my tolerance for certain things has been reduced to a mere shadow of its former self. Situations that used to merely make me shake my head now caused me great consternation. I've always loved that word—consternation. It sounds exactly like the kind of word a grumpy old coot would use on special occasions.

Take, for instance, the woman who came to the lot and stood for twenty minutes debating whether or not a certain blue spruce was taller than the one Nancy Englebrecht had in her foyer (she pronounced it “foy-yay”—I guess no one ever told her we don’t have those in Utah), as if I should have known who Nancy Englebrecht was.

I was on the verge of telling her I had been to Nancy’s house with a tape measure, and the blue spruce in question topped Nancy’s by a whopping six inches, when the lady in question turned, sighed, and told her husband that they had better keep looking. It just wouldn’t do.

It was a tree, for crying out loud, and a right pretty one, too. I had cut that one myself and felt a sense of pride whenever I looked at it. But for some reason, if it couldn’t compete with Nancy What’s-Her-Name’s tree, it wasn’t good enough. After all that, I’m not sure I would have sold it to her anyway. Sure enough, that woman caused me a great deal of consternation.

I had given myself up as a lost cause, resigned to my fate of scuffing around in bedroom slippers, shaking my cane at the newspaper boy and grunting "Bah, humbug" at the season. But one particularly bright and clear night midway through December, my cynicism vanished.

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