I cut a tree for Christmas yesterday, on a morning so cold and crisp it stung my nostrils to breathe. It was me and my furry mutt Paco out in the snow, walking around behind the barn of a tree farm on the road to Monroe, like a print right out of Currier and Ives.

I chose a blue balsam fir eight feet tall, nicely tapered, full and symmetrical. My new Stihl chainsaw refused to stay running, gasping and quitting whenever I pulled on the trigger. Fortunately I'd brought one of the bowsaws they'd provided, and a few strokes of the freshly sharpened blade dropped the fir into the snow. Another lesson in appropriate technology. I coaxed Paco into the front seat of my old Subaru wagon, lowered the rear seats and stuffed it in trunk first. Then I drove sround to the house, took my checkbook out of the glove box and went inide to pay.

The owners were a picture-perfect old Maine couple right out of Central Casting: white-haired, cheery and loquacious. They were sitting by their old woodburning Clarion cookstove with a steaming kettle on it, in a kitchen that must have been eighty degrees.

As I wrote out the check, I complimented them on the quality of their trees. It takes a lot of work to grow good Christmas trees, with many hours of seasonal tending and pruning. I told them about last December, when I'd brought home a handsome golden-green spruce that reeked like cat piss as soon as I got it through the door, so much so that my wife threw it out into the snow after only fifteen minutes. It never even made it into the tree stand.

"Oh no, deah!" the old lady chuckled. "That was a cat spruce. You don't bring them in the house!"