Christmas in June : 125-Year-Old Fir Selected for U.S. Capitol’s Tree

BIG BEAR — It’s one of the great trials and anxieties of the Christmas holiday season: the requisite trip to the tree lot to select that perfect evergreen.

Not too short! Not too tall! This one’s too skinny! That one’s too bushy! That’s got a bad side!

And so Paul Pincus came this week, to the mountains above San Bernardino to pick the “Nation’s Tree” for holiday display on the west lawn of the nation’s Capitol.

Talk about a million critics. Talk about pressure.

The entire San Bernardino National Forest was his tree lot, and on Tuesday--after hours of driving around Big Bear looking at one tree after another and as forestry employees grew anxious--Pincus got out of the car, circled a 125-year-old towering white fir and proclaimed:

“Yes. This one.”

There was no choir to sing the praises, “O, Christmas Tree!” Just the soft rush of wind through the trees like a thousand evergreen wind chimes.

One forestry official jotted in his notebook. Another, who saw this fir several weeks earlier and promoted it as her personal choice, beamed.

This annual exercise is almost ho-hum stuff to Pincus, who as the landscape architect for the Capitol has selected holiday trees for the last 30 years. He has traveled much of the nation on his searches--wondering, once in Ohio, if that state even had any tall trees.

But this was Pincus’ first visit to a Southern California forest, and the first chance for the four local national forests--Angeles, Los Padres, Cleveland and San Bernardino--to strut their stuff. Because this is the centennial anniversary of the San Bernardino National Forest, the search focused here.

San Bernardino National Forest officials got word in January that this year’s tree would come from their land. In March, after the snows melted, forestry officials searched the mountains and developed a list of trees.

Pincus arrived Monday and within two hours of landing at smog-shrouded Ontario Airport he was being escorted through the Jeffrey and ponderosa pines at 8,000 feet, in search of a white fir--a tree more favored than the other local trees for its conical shape and fullness.

He suggested to the local tree experts that they were worrying too much. “By the time I’m through with it,” he said, “you’ll never even recognize it. And every year, people say, ‘That’s the best one yet!’ ”

By day’s end Monday he had seen four trees. One was too short. Another, asymmetrical. The next leaned a tad awkwardly. But the last one was good, and led the competition into Tuesday.

Well-shaped tall trees are hard to find, Pincus said. Over the years, too many have been infested with insects, or have begun to lean or lost limbs to wind or fire.

On Tuesday he struck pay dirt--the tree that was the personal choice of Forester Merri Carol Murray. A 75-footer, with that classical Christmas tree shape. No holes. Good color. Dense with foliage. And next to a service road so the truck can get in.

“I can envision this,” Pincus said, “on the Capitol grounds.” And that was that.

The forest agency now will invite local schoolchildren to create 5,000 secular ornaments to adorn the tree. The tree’s location will be kept secret--to prevent vandalism--until it is felled during a public ceremony in November.

The tree will be trucked to Washington, hoisted into a five-foot-deep hole, encased in concrete and supported with wires.

Decorating it will take a 10-member crew in cherry pickers about a week, Pincus said. They are old hands at this, he said, and won’t bicker about where to put this ornament or that.

And don’t worry about the lights, he added. The 4,000 of them--amber, clear and twinklers, but no reds, whites or blues that might connote religious significance--will be taken out of their storage cartons and tested.

Murray said she will fly back to Washington--her hometown--to watch the lighting ceremony Dec. 8.

“Helping select the tree was a matter of professionalism,” she said. “But bringing a tree back to Washington will be like a John Boy Walton homecoming.”