Initially, Ted looked forward to his family’s tradition of picking a Christmas tree in the woods and chopping it down. As he and his sister Tiffany grew older, though, they began to wonder whether such trees were protected. Their father waved away their concerns. He put a finger to his nose like St. Nicholas. “It’s the Christmas spirit” or “No one else is using it,” he’d say.
This tradition continued when they moved to Gray Hill.
One year when Ted and Tiffany’s parents brought them on the hiking trails in Ronald Brown Park, their mother and father took them aside.
“Mother, is it time?” Father said.
“Yes, I believe so, Father,” Mother replied.
Ted hadn’t realized how quickly the year had flown by, and it was November.
“I don’t know,” Tiffany said. “Something isn’t right.”
“Yeah, I’ve got an awful feeling about this.” Ted was shaking his head vigorously.
But Tiffany was only eleven years old and Ted nine, so at the end of the day they didn’t have much say in the matter.
Their father set his backpack down near some rotting leaves and toadstools. He knelt and, reaching between granola bars and packs of instant hot peppermint cocoa, grasped a wooden handle. A hatchet soon came out of hiding.
There was a glint in their father’s eye and his cheeks had suddenly gotten very rosy. Ted thought their father’s overgrown red beard made him look like a younger St. Nicholas from one of those claymation Christmas movies. Even his movements as he set to work chopping a tree down seemed erratic to Ted, like he was being stop-motion animated.
He’d found a tree rather quickly, one he proclaimed to be a blister pine because of its weeping blisters. Resin came out of its wounds.
“I think something’s wrong with Father,” Tiffany said to Ted as they watched.
Their mother, overhearing, nodded at them. “It must be a balsam fir.”
But as much as their father hacked and chopped, he couldn’t make much progress on the tree.
“Father, maybe you should pick a different tree,” Tiffany said, “or, better yet, let’s get one from the store.”
“No,” their father said. “This is the one.
“It’s just taking a long time because he’s using a hatchet and not a larger axe,” their mother said.
That day’s labors became the night’s, as the sun went down and the stars came out. The hooting of owls gave way to stranger noises.
Their father continued to hack away until something stopped him. At first it appeared that the axe blade had gotten stuck in the tree.
But, peering through the dark, Ted could see that two large, needly branches were holding it in place. A couple of eyes glinted crimson about a foot above their father’s head.
Ted tried to alert his father, but it was too late. It wrenched the hatchet free, and whatever was there pretending to be a tree struck their father down the middle of his head with it.
The two children ran screaming, while their mother pursued after them saying, “It’ll pass.”
They didn’t see their father again after that, but one day not long before Christmas someone hiking off the trails in Ronald Brown Park found him. He was scattered throughout a mutant species of fir like ornaments.
The mother's calm "It'll pass" is the most unsettling moment for me. Even more than the creature itself. Is this meant to suggest she knew what the tree was? I'd almost want more of her perspective.