A Family Man's Search for the Perfect Christmas Tree

On this episode of Our American Stories, OAS listener Jim Johnson shares the story of his search for the perfect Christmas tree.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is our American Stories and we love our listeners' stories.
And by the way, send them to our American stories
dot com because they are indeed some of our favorites,
and there's some of your favorites too. Jim Johnson is
a long time pastor who lives in Rogers, Minnesota. Pastor
Jim's heart moving story Everett's Last Christmas Carol needed a

(00:31):
follow up. Here he is again Jim Johnson, this time
with the Christmas tree story.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Hey, have you ever had bad luck with Christmas trees?
Me too? I have conflicts with holiday evergreens. If I
were in a recovery group, and I probably should be,
I would say it this way. Hi, I'm Jim, and
I have issues with Christmas trees. I mean, I'm a
Minnesota guy, a holly jolly father and grandfather, big time

(01:02):
lover of Christmas, a heavy hitting broker of holiday cheer,
and possibly one of the biggest fans of Yule Tide
carols in America. But Christmas trees have generally gotten the
best of me. Here's part of my confession. I want
stuffed ten Ponderosa pines into a fifteen passenger Dodge van

(01:24):
on a warm day in Santa Paula, California for a
day of services in a barn. We drove forty minutes
with those trees, sweating bullets and our van chugging home
slowly through Ventura and Oxnard and into Camario down the
one oh one. It was fully illegal, I'm sure, but

(01:44):
I did it for the Christmas trees. Confession number two.
I once also procured one of the last two trees
remaining in a Northern Minnesota grocery store parking lot. At
dusk on Christmas Eve. There were exactly two trees left
in the parking lot, and I purchased the ugliest, paltriest,

(02:07):
weakest excuse for a tree. But my biggest misstep with
fresh cut, evergreen Christmas trees is what I want to
tell you about today. It was something that occurred before
all nine of my children and my wife, and before
God very likely also before our representation of the heavenly host.

(02:29):
And I was forever changed, and I want to admit
it publicly before you today. I heard the unmistakable sound
of hissing directed at me personally during a festive holiday
about the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. It all
came to a head at a tree farm near Elk River, Minnesota,

(02:49):
fifteen years ago, exactly this month, on a below zero
day in December, in sub zero temps, car exhaust fumes,
creating a gaseous image of heavenly clouds surrounding all of
my children and at least twenty other witnesses, along with
my Christmas bride, Linda, a radical Christian partisan who does

(03:11):
not miss a thing, standing there and shaking their heads.
And this year at the same farm, in front of
that same Christmas beauty, and that the three youngest of
the nine children, all of them now teenagers, I finally
came to a point of sweet redemption with a quadruple victory.

(03:33):
Two balsam furs, a pair of mittens, a spendy Christmas wreath,
and a cup of hot chocolate. And that's what I
want to tell you about today. But first I'd like
to start at the top. I am an ordained Lutheran pastor,
and pastors, I must say, in general, make fairly shaky humans.
Sometimes they think too much, they worry about everything, They

(03:56):
stop living in the moment, stop praying, and they get
so over rot with responsibility they forget how to laugh
and ride the waves as far as I have researched it,
and I have researched it well. Pastors are almost always
completely human, decidedly, painfully, inherently human. And even if they

(04:16):
are transformed by the Gospel of Jesus and called by
God to serve the Lord and to love their neighbors,
and though they are surrounded by teams of lovely people,
these pastors, priests, and ministers have deep and abiding floss
even the best of them, especially the best of them,
and particularly in the month of December. So when it

(04:38):
comes to the holidays, the very people who spend their
Novembers in Decembers thinking about how to make a perfect
Christmas service, how to connect with the world that lays
long in sin and aer re pining, like the Carol says,
how to tell the story of the baby Jesus and
the long suffering Mary, the mother of Jesus, treasuring these

(04:59):
things in her life heart. And the self sacrificing carpenter Joseph,
how is he a simple carpenter supposed to raise a king?
And the wise men from the east, bearing gifts, they
traversed Afar, and the excitable a little rough around the
edges shepherds and the heavenly host standing around the shepherds

(05:20):
out in their fields, with the angels singing glory to
God in the highest and on earth, peace, goodwill toward men.
But how is that supposed to work when you're a
stressed out dad and a low wick pastor. Remember the
part of the Christmas carol, Silent Night, That is what
I'm shooting for. You know, all is calm, all is

(05:43):
bright rounde on virgin mother and child, holy infant, so
tender and mild. And then that sleep and heavenly peace. Well,
you know that's exactly what I want at Christmas, sleeping
in heavenly peace. Isn't that what you want? But when
it's mid December and you're at the end of your
proverbial rope, worn and wearied by the meetups, concerts, visitations,

(06:08):
advent services, kids programs, gifts exchanges, low budget shopping breakaways,
senior care scrambles, and extra gospel preaching preparations, you don't
feel like singing, Oh, how beautiful the sky is with
the sparkling stars on high you know that one. How
they glitter brightly, gleaming, how they twinkle glad some beaming. No,

(06:31):
you don't want that. You're saying, that's not me right now.
You want to skip December twenty fourth through January first.
You feel like, hey, let's go to Alta and Snowbird. Instead,
you feel like e Or from Winnie the Pooh or
Ebenezer Scrooge disguised as a spiritual clergy trying to put
on a good face because you know, when you're down

(06:54):
and out and it's COVID season and the government limitations
are such that they don't want you to stand by
his cradle. They want you to give a little elbow
room to the cradle. That the wise men from the
East shouldn't be traveling from the orient land, they should
be staying home for a four week pause. You feel
like you're bent and like me, going every which way

(07:17):
but loose. They should have stayed home because the King
thus lays in a lowly manger, and we don't want
those hard time families at the Nativity stable to catch
the virus. So parents and pastors want to provide something sweet,
something good, something from God when times are hard, and

(07:37):
even more when it's bad. So that led me to
my Christmas Tree crisis Number one. We were serving in
a church in glacial northern Minnesota near Foston, population eighteen
hundred in the bone chilling hinterlands near Bamydgi. When I
was in my early thirties, a brand new young pastor

(07:59):
and short of cash, and when Sweet Linda and the
three little daughters were negotiating for a big time, live
green Christmas tree cut from the woods, I talked them
into delaying the process until I had a little bit
of more money. God is my witness. I admit this openly.
I was dumb enough to talk them into delaying the

(08:21):
decision of cutting down a tree until the day of
the Christmas Eve service. I said, hey, kids, let's do
it the way the song puts it. You know, on
the twelve days of Christmas. We'll start celebrating on the
first day, Christmas Eve, and we'll end on January sixth
or so. We'll get the full twelve days. We'll cut

(08:41):
down the tree on December twenty fourth, decorate it after church,
hang the Garland, open presents, eat the honey hickory ham
and then after we get back from church, we'll all
unpack the ultimate Christmas Eve experience and we'll have a
great time. So with that expectation, we jumped in the car.

(09:02):
We put the ham on low. Little Elizabeth and Hannah
and Lydia were bouncing with anticipation in the back of
the Ford Aerostar Mini van. And then and there I
learned that my IQ is very low, my discretion is borderline.
Because the u cut trees were closed already shuddered at noon,

(09:25):
and in the days before smartphones and GPS and easy websites,
we were stuck big time. I said, hey, we can
go to the hardware store where the cob scouts were
selling pre cut trees yesterday. But we drove over there
and they were closed too.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
And when we come back, more of Jim Johnson with
his Christmas tree story. When we come back, more of
Jim Johnson's story. Here on our American stories. And we

(10:09):
continue with our American stories in the story of Jim Johnson.
And now let's return to the story of Jim Johnson's
Christmas tree.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Linda started rolling her eyes. She whispered, are you sure
about this? And I was saying, we'll go to the
grocery store. They're gonna be awesome. They have all sorts
of trees there. But you guessed it right. When we
pulled up to Paliubicki's IgA grocery store. It also was closed,
and there were exactly two trees left, two trees suffering

(10:42):
from want and famine and malnutrition and neglect, and we
had no choice. We bought a Charlie Brown tree and
put ten dollars in the cash box in the lonely
Coleman cooler in the parking lot, and my oldest daughter,
aged six, Elizabeth, said, Daddy, what happened? Oh, this will

(11:04):
be fine. I said, that was my first Christmas tree failure,
And at that point all three daughters, Liz, Hann and
Lydia were settled with a notion for a lifetime that
goes like this, Our dad really doesn't know what he's
talking about. So three years later after that failure came

(11:26):
a day of what I thought would be a time
of major retribution. We had moved to Minneapolis, and we
visited the Goldenman Tree Farm, forty five minutes away from
our house past Elk River, across the Mississippi River, in
the farm fields by Zimmerman. We left on a Thursday afternoon, late,

(11:50):
but again pre GPS and in the days before SIRI,
the way was not as clear as I had recalled it,
and the traffic north on the notorious Minnesota Highway one
oh one was clogged tighter than my thirty six inch
waist pants on a thirty eight inch bother And we
arrived at about five thirty, a half hour past closing,

(12:12):
having traversed Afar on a Thursday night. That meant we
could pick up a Swedish saw and cut down a
six foot spruce tree in the dark, driving the minivan
down icy roads of the tree farm by ourselves, and
put the forty dollars in the honor system cooler by
the gate. And there was not a whole lot of
romance in the process. We cut down the tree with

(12:35):
frozen fingers in the black Minnesota night, but there was
no hay ride, no hot chocolate, no apple cider, no
caramel corn, no families by the fire. Just cut down
the tree as fast as you can and get out
of there. Daughter three, Lydia, said palmer Dad, how come
we came so late, asked little Benny, aged four. And

(12:58):
so for the next few years we gave. We cheated
with an artificial tree, a symbol of all that is
wrong about American Christmas. An artificial tree, plastic broomlike branches
on a steel pole painted green, silver spikes painted hunter green.
And you own one, and you bring it out, and

(13:19):
soon you have to make the admission. Yes, we have
advent apathy here. We don't care. We store pretend arbors
in the basement. We are clean, tidy people who disdain
wood and dangle plastic wires with tiny lights on petroleum
products shaped into a verdant cone. But we did that too,

(13:40):
and I admit it. So finally, after a time of
proper fatherly repentance, I made a promise to my radiant,
radical Christmas loving bride and our family, now at its apex,
five daughters, four boys. I made a vow, we will
go back to the tree farm near Elk River, and

(14:02):
I will give you the whole show. I was now
in my second decade of pastoral service, a pastor with
experience now but still utterly and incurably human, and then
all the more tired. In my over eager service as
director of a Christian Bible college. I taught four classes,

(14:22):
I directed a team of professors, and interacted with parents
and college kids and churches in a way that could
stagger even the best of people. Persons Besides that, we
were living in a fish bowl right on campus. We
dwelled in a church house by Medicine Lake in Bucolic, Plymouth, Minnesota,
and as such we were twenty four to seven on

(14:45):
call and Christmas tree farm cutting experiences demand really a
full Saturday, of which I had very few in those days.
Saturdays and Sundays were my busiest days, especially in December,
and I was on the verge of becoming a shell
of a man. So we piled into our now classic
fifteen passenger Dodge van, all eleven of us, with the

(15:08):
last seat pulled out so we could have room to
squeeze in a tree if the kids in the back
would be willing to duck a little bit for the
forty five minute ride through weekend traffic on the one
to one. What would be so hard about that? And
so as we loaded into the van, I could feel
the temperature rising in my head. Those weeks at the
Bible College were eighty hour marathons in December, end of semester, grading,

(15:34):
a Christmas concert weekend, four separate showings, one hundred and
seventy college students, twenty student pastors, one hundred and twenty
semester papers to peruse one hundred and seventy finals to
correct Christmas parties, kids gatherings, candlelight services, Christmas shopping to
complete under pressure. My friends with smaller families would tell me,

(15:57):
you brought this on yourself, Pal, you wanted to this
big family, And that was true. But somehow, when you're
a dad in your mid forties with a seventeen year
old daughter and the third bench as far as she
could get away from us, and a one year old
boy in a baby seat behind the driver's chair and
adventures in Odyssey Christmas episodes blasting out of the dodge

(16:18):
Raum thirty five hundred in mid December, I was dying
of the pressure, weary from minimal sleep, and praying this
Christmas memory would go fast. We arrived with crowds, the
throngs of Minnesotans at the Goldenman Tree Farm, and a
world of sin and sorrow was raining out there. The

(16:39):
tires of our fifteen passenger van were spinning, and pickups
were weaving in and out of the lanes of fraser furs,
white pines, blue spruces, balsam furs, and there in that
humid van outside sub degrees below zero temperatures. We could
not quite find that tree, the exact right tree. So

(17:02):
I pushed a little, hoping that the nations would soon
prove the glories of His righteousness and heaven and nature sing.
But it took us so long, and the dying young
Dad and the two poop to party Pastor was almost
ready to let sin and sorrow grow. But somehow we
cut down the tree. We stuffed it in the back
of the van. We drove it up to the shake

(17:24):
and bag line and there I thought, for a precious minute,
let's skip the two dollars shaken bagline. I mean, it's
only a forty five minute ride home, and it's freezing
out here, and long lay the world in Sininara, pining.
Impatience is taking over, and I could not keep my
eyes open. I said, let's just go, and Linda said, no,

(17:44):
we're going to pay the two dollars. Go shake the tree,
get in line, and put that little orange netting around
that tree. That, my friends, was where I made a
big Christmas tree mistake. True natives of the land of
the ten thousand Lake State know the value of Minnesota

(18:05):
and ice can be a misnomer and a smoke screen.
Those in the no call it minasorta nice. That is,
there is a passion cloaked in passive aggressiveness. These are
northern women and norsemen. They're soldiers. They chop trees, they
sail Lake Superior, and they may smile, nod and extend

(18:27):
their hand in peace. But cross the line of well
defined boundaries and you're gonna find a Viking there, leering
with eyes like darts, a frosty smile, and a handshake
that will squeeze the orange juice right out of you.

Speaker 1 (18:41):
And you've been listening to Jim Johnson telling his Christmas
tree story Minnesota, Ice and again, we are always looking
for your stories, Christmas stories, any kind of stories. Send
them to Ouramerican stories dot com. When we come back,
more of Jim Johnson's Christmas Tree story here on our
American Stories and we continue with our American Stories and

(19:41):
with Jim Johnson and his Christmas Tree story.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
So we parked the dodge ram van in the steaming
huddle of about fifteen cards parked here and there on
top of the tree farm, and there were three shaken
baglines and three teams of young young men handling fresh
cut trees in the cold, and up we came like
an army. I was George Patten. My kids marched up

(20:08):
to the shakers and beggars like weary victors with our tree.
And I stood with the seven eight foot fur in
my hand, and teenage Ben and eleven year old Seth
handling the trunk end, and me really thinking, do we
really need the shake in the bag? I mean, while
fields and flocks, rocks, hills and plains repeat the sounding joy,

(20:29):
is it really necessary to shake your tree and to
put it in an orange net? Linda said, yes, it
is necessary. My wife, my Mary, my Jeannette is a bella.
We will pay for the shaking and the begging. We
will pay the two dollars. So I looked at her
and I shook my head. Beautiful as the mother, ah,

(20:52):
beautiful as the child, I thought to myself, and looking back,
the finality of her word, as tired as I was,
was beautiful too. There in the lull in those three lines,
I paused, and I did not know I was, in
fact the last person in line. I was dying of
impatience and could not see it. I knew it was

(21:15):
two degrees below zero, and twenty thirty Minnesota ice buyers
of Christmas trees were standing there, waiting, watching. No one
was moving. I knew I was tired. My glasses were fogging.
Sweat rolled down my forehead. There was a line, but
I didn't really see it. I was too tired to
see it. It was a frozen huddle of Minnesotans in

(21:37):
the fog of exhaust. And so while these passive vikings
stood holding their trees, I said to my boys, let's go. Guys,
follow me, too tired to notice, a march to the
front of the line and hand it in my tree.
There was an unusual quiet when I got there. The
twenty something tree bagger, long and lean, looked at me,

(21:59):
turned and took a breath. In an instant he snatched
my tree out of my hand. Thank you, sir, he said,
with depth and drama for all to hear. A very
merry Christmas to you, sir, A very merry Christmas. At
that point I realized that thirty people were looking at

(22:21):
me and thinking that idiot I was the buffoon who
came too soon, the Christmas stiff who blew past twenty
people in line to race to the front of the
tree shaker and beggar. My daughter, Elizabeth bold and direct said, Dad,
you budged. It was visceral. You could cut my foolishness

(22:42):
with a knife. I heard a distinct hissing from several
of the frozen moms of Christmas. I was not a pastor,
not the father of nine, a lover of Christmas, not
a spiritual leader. I was a bozo who barged to
the begging station. And since the tree was shaken and netted,
there was no turning back. The silence of judgment is

(23:05):
a piercing sound when you're a Minnesotan, and with all
those Vikings watching and looking in, your nine children gaping,
and your wife, sweet Linda, the Christmas bride, no longer
standing in love, admiration and respect, I was in trouble.
It was there when I realized the tree was not shaken.

(23:26):
I was shaken and bagged. Why did you do that, daddy,
asked one of my prophetic children. Why did you budge
in front of the line with a Christmas tree. I
shook my head and said, let's get out of here
and drove home. It has been fifteen years since that
tragic day. Linda and I raised the kids in southern

(23:47):
California and living in suns splash Ventura County, a land
of highways and hurry ups, was good for me. It
was a place of high taxes and long lines. We
enjoyed skyrocketing real estate. We enjoyed the beaches. We found
that time heals almost everything. The concept of nice takes

(24:07):
on a different hue in southern California, where the lines
are long and the kids are clustered, and the one
oh one Venture Highway clogs and clutters or races like
a speedway. In California, the clash of far Sea and
Spanish and English and Chinese means you have to learn
to watch and wait a little bit more than you
do in Minnesota. Southern California gathers in children by the

(24:31):
millions from Asia, India, Iran and Latin America. And there
in Ventura County, I made a hundred Hispanic friends. I
learned to be a good neighbor, and I figured out
actually how to wait in lines. My son Isaiah was
only three at the time of my first Christmas tree failure.

(24:52):
Thank you, sir, A very merry Christmas to you, sir.
So this year, my son Isaiah sat in the driver's seat.
I slouched in the passenger seat with my hands folded
in our ancient Toyota Secoya, and I was resolved to
renew my Christmas credentials. You see, two years ago we
moved back to Minnesota from California to work with new churches.

(25:15):
I'm now a coach and a friend to young pastors
and brand new startup churches. And I'm fifty nine and
slower by several steps. The Christmas Tree farm is only
fifteen miles from our house now, so I was determined
to return to the scene of the crime. We came
this year on Thanksgiving Day, two pm, and I was

(25:37):
surprised with a healthy COVID crowd meandering among Christmas trees
at the farm, coming together at the end for hot
cocoa in a place by an outside campfire. That this
was really fun. There was no snow and no sholl
just fifty COVID Christmas tree customers grabbing a cup of

(25:58):
coffee or hot cocoa, some with masks, most with saws,
ready to cut down a Christmas tree and get shaked
and begged. We were distanced and cautious, but not necessarily
because of the coronavirus nineteen. But because we're learning to
wait our turn, it's minsorda nice to be sure, and

(26:21):
I was determined to score a victory. I brought my
mandate mask and I wore it in the store. I
bought a pair of mittens for Linda. I circled around
and scored a Christmas wreath for thirty five bucks, and
I walked with the kids out to the field and
cut down two trees. Actually, they cut down the two trees.
I watched. We dragged them up the hill where I

(26:43):
waited in line in thirty five degree weather, no snow,
no pushing ahead and line. I watched the young men
shake the tree and bag the tree. I was patient,
I was nice, I was awake. I waited my turn.
I stood in the a and when we got home,
my three teenagers sliced open the two handsome trees, released

(27:07):
them from their orange netting prison, and helped set them up,
one downstairs and one on the main floor. You know,
in a world of COVID scarers and political upheaval, mistrust
and division, job losses, and fears of global strife, I
think we can all learn a little bit by cutting
down Christmas trees and waiting in line you ever sing?

(27:32):
The third verse of it came upon a midnight clear.
It's the verse that says, yet with the woes of
sinnen strife, the world has suffered long beneath the angel
strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong and man
at war with man hears not the love song which
they bring. Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,

(27:53):
and hear the angels sing EDMUNDS. Sears wrote it back
in eighteen forty nine, and I think he has it right.
In twenty twenty, we live in the woes of sin
and strife. We've suffered wrong with people that war in
a country and division, and all those carfumes and crowds
of passive, aggressive and downtrodden people, and some too nice

(28:15):
to say anything, like Cyrs says it quote, We hear
not the love song God brings with the angels, and
we don't always hear Jesus either, sir, So hush the noise,
ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing. In
terms of recovery and ingratitude for all those shakers and

(28:37):
beggars in the world this Christmas, I admit I haven't
quite got this tanenbaumb thing licked, but I will say
it again this way. Hi, I'm Jim. I have problems
with Christmas trees, but I'm learning the baby Jesus grew
up and died in a cross and rose again and

(28:57):
is alive, very much alive and real. If the Christmas
child can hush the noise and hear the angels sing,
then I suppose I can smile and wait in line
for five minutes. I'll get my Christmas tree early. I'll
grab a cup of Coco. I won't make my boys
squeeze into a van with ten trees and a fifteen

(29:17):
passenger van, and I'll greet everyone who will make eye
contact with the words thank you, sir, A very merry Christmas, ma'am.
I won't even cut to the front of the line.
I'll buy an exorbitant Christmas wreath, and I'll make sure
what happened on that holy night two thousand years ago

(29:38):
to change a man like me, little by little really
pays off. How about you. Merry Christmas, sir.

Speaker 1 (29:46):
And a special thanks to Jim Johnson, who is a
long time pastor and lives in Rogers, Minnesota. Again, share
your stories with us and now American Stories any kind.
We love these listeners stories, send them to American stories
dot com. Jim Johnson's Christmas tree story here on our
American Stories