The Hole Story

By Zach Hively

In which I dig myself deeper.
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To be clear: I am not one of those people who leave the Christmas tree up until February.Oh no, I’m far more insufferable. I’m one of those people who leave the solstice tree up until February.

In my own incriminating defense, I have, for years, put up living solstice trees. Not cut-down-and-slowly-drying-up living trees, but root-ball-in-really-heavy-dirt ones. And by “put up,” I mean, “drag to the front of my house.”

I can’t bring the tree inside. For one, I cannot lift it up the front steps. For two, staying outside keeps the tree from thinking it has retired somewhere like Phoenix or, based on my thermostat, Juno.

I have to keep the tree where it still, sometimes, at least traditionally, gets cold in winter. Or else it might put roots down through my living room floor.

Outside, though, is also windy. And it is where crows and ravens live. For these reasons, and not for laziness reasons, I do not put ornaments on the solstice tree. It’s mostly just a tree.
But I do add twinkle lights.

Throughout the winter season, I enjoy looking out the front window at the tree’s top ten inches or so. I could put twinkle lights on just this portion and save at least five dollars a year in discount post-Christmas light shopping.

But no.The entire tree sports warm white twinkle lights by the time I decide I’m never doing this again. This way, with a full set of lights on the tree that lives in full view of the driveway, the UPS driver does not talk about me on the UPS driver subreddit.

Most people take down their trees before the Super Bowl because of children and other fire hazards. Some leave them up because the tree is one tapered pillar of joy in a world gone mad. Me? It’s simple. I once again forgot to dig a hole before the ground froze.

Okay, I didn’t forget exactly.  I thought of it every day; I just didn’t think, what with there not being winter anymore, that the ground would be a concern. “I’ll dig your hole,” I promised the tree—usually just before going to bed, a time when I ritualistically transfer that day’s to-do list in its entirety to the following day.

(I believe this practice originates from the pagan solstice holiday of Yule, as in, “Yule do this right before you run the risk of social shame.”)

That sort of traditional motivating pressure happened on a recent Sunday, when I needed a desperate reason to procrastinate on something else.

The hole site, which I chose with consideration for Is this out of my way?, proved compliant for about six inches of sand removal. Then, it proved tougher than my shovel and my muscles put together.

It left me little choice; I had to let it sit in the sunlight until it caught up to climate change, when I could scrape out another inch or two.

This process proved, in the end, to prolong my joy in planting the solstice tree in the solstice tree forest. I:

a) made tangible progress each day I remembered to dig;
b) never committed more than four minutes in a single go;
c) stopped when I realized these were rocks and not more frozen sand; and
d) received Mother Nature’s incoming-cold-front nudge to drag the big ol’ pot o’ dirt down to the hole before I became one of those absolute insufferables who leaves up the solstice tree until March.

Although I suppose—at the risk of digging myself deeper here—it could have become an equinox tree, had I left well enough alone.