He’s young. He’s tall. And he’s on his way to the White House as we speak. The hottest new straight shooter of the Trump administration is a 19-and-a-half-foot Fraser fir. The twentysomething-year-old tree will be installed in the Blue Room next week, just in time for Thanksgiving, a.k.a. Little Christmas. He doesn’t have a name, which made it tough on the campaign trail, but no matter. He’s here now. And maybe he will save us.
How does a country tree from the backwoods of America even become an official White House Christmas Tree? Well, when the National Christmas Tree Association’s annual Christmas tree contest in Green Bay, Wisconsin, loves a tree farm very much, they choose it as the winner that year. And then that winning farm gets to offer up one of its own to the White House, its new, adoptive home for the holiday season. Two officials come down from Washington wearing—I don’t know—skinny ties, black suits, and dark sunglasses, and they look and they look and they find the tree they love the best, and chop it down and haul it to Washington, where it’s presented to the first family.
This year’s honor goes to Mountain Top, a Fraser-fir farm in North Carolina’s Avery County. And the tall beaut that the Trump agents chose was not the the Goliath of trees. It was the David. An extremely large, perhaps unwieldy David. Larry Smith, the grower, told the Charlotte Observer that the tree comes with a “Cinderella story.” It was one that he had “basically abandoned,” declining to trim the thing over the years. “They just loved the natural look to it,” he said, adding later, “This particular tree got the last laugh.”
Smith doesn’t expand on why he had written off that tree, but it’s a nice little story, a classic triumph of the underdog, like The Bad News Bears, or Rudy, or literally any other sports movie ever made. You could read into it, if you’re prone to reading into things that this administration is up to. Is it a reminder this holiday season that no one expected Trump to win, despite his humble beginnings as a millionaire’s son in Queens? A win for beleaguered Christmas in the War on Christmas? I don’t think so, honestly. This just seems like a congenial, trustworthy tree, who made it big despite it all.
The tree is always the pièce de résistance in the holiday schema at the president’s home, and it’s long been a hotbed of controversy. The Nixons put a peace sign on top of theirs instead of a traditional star, which was criticized by Big Star and people who hate peace. The Clintons displayed one ornament that depicted a stocking for then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich filled with coal. One year, the Obamas let through a Warholian reproduction of Mao Zedong on one of its ornaments. It’s good to get ahead of all the possible ways holiday decorating can go wrong.
And in the end, this seems like the best thing to enter (or exit) the White House in months. Who needs a dog when they have such a likable fir?
