Trees, the heroes of Christmas

This article is published in number 1 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until January 3, 2023

The Christmas tree you have at home is a warrior. It’s probably a spruce, a species that has roots on this planet for over 130 million years, his ancestors lived with dinosaurs and left them behind. A relative of hers is the oldest tree in the world, “Old Tjikko”, a tall fir tree in Fulufjället National Park, Sweden: Tjikko is older than the New Testament, it will be 10,000 years old in a few centuries (humans and climate crisis permitting).

The closest relatives of your Christmas tree they fought the storm Vaiathe tremendous sirocco wind that hit the Triveneto in 2018, and now they are dealing with printer beetle infestations, a pest that affects woods that are already in difficulty. Many have been defeated, over twenty million trees lost in north-eastern Italy, a carnage, 11 September of conifers. The one in your living room comes from a nursery, perhaps in the Casentino, in Tuscany, or from Cuneo or Belluno, the Christmas Tree Valley Italian, and for being there at Christmas with you faced the worst drought in years. In short, we see it there, with the gifts underneath and the star at the top, and perhaps we underestimate it, for us it is religious-vegetable furniture and little more, but the Christmas tree (the real and organic one, not the plastic one made by burning fossil fuels) would have a lot of things to teach us. The fir tree is one of the most adaptive and interesting living beings on this strange planet, it successfully survived the ice age and is now trying to unleash it even in the industrial age.

“Christmas trees entered Italian homes after the war, when we stopped being farmers and became citizens,” he says. Antonio Brunoriwho works for the forest certifier Pefc and he is one of the great connoisseurs of the relationship between Italians and their trees. “We adopted this Protestant tradition en masse, which Catholics didn’t like, because we wanted to keep at home some of the nature that we felt we had lost by leaving the fields behind.” A memory tree, a postcard tree of a past that in the meantime becomes more and more remote, today only three out of a hundred Italians work in agriculture. That of the Christmas firs is an agricultural story much more than a forest one, given that they almost always come from nurseries and from crops such as tomatoes or oranges and never from the real forest: «They are minimal and almost a bit primitive agricultural processes» , says Brunori, «at four or five years of life the firs are rooted up, placed in a vase and sold». The first to decorate conifers were the bakers of Freiburg, Germany, with apples and pieces of bread, the first to do it for Christmas were the merchants of Riga, Latvia. We are between 1400 and 1500. Within a couple of centuries it becomes something Protestants do and Catholics despise. In Italy it becomes a common taste much more recently, thanks to Margherita di Savoia, queen consort, wife of Umberto I and the most common order in pizzerias in Italy. It was she who taught this Nordic tradition to the Italian bourgeoisie at the beginning of the last century: within a few decades the tree becomes something “that has always been done” and without which there is no Christmas.

The secular Magnificent Community of Val di Fiemmein Trentino, is one of the oldest institutions in Italy, as old and solid as the fir woods it manages on behalf of the territory: among these woods, in particular conditions of soil and light exposure, even the rare resonance firsthose luthiers from all over the world come to buy for their perfect acoustics. From this corner of Trentino, for ten years tradition, monumental Christmas trees start, those of the Italian squaresa custom that will return but that the Vaia storm has slowed down, today it is not possible to take trees from woods that have been destroyed by the wind and are trying to be reborn. The year of the Morandi bridge disaster they gave a giant one to the municipality of Genoa, the same thing they have always done with much smaller plants
sent to hospitals and rest homes, a small gesture of care, from the valley to the city. Here the foresters have an expert eye for the ideal Christmas tree, that of children’s drawings. If ever there was a formula, a recipe, they would be able to write it. «The tree we are looking for is symmetrically perfect, with robust branches of the same length, 15 to 22 meters tall, with thick needles, usually a specimen weighing between 50 and 80 quintals. And it has to be near a road, of course,” he explains Ilario Cavada, forest technician of the Magnificent Community. Bringing it from the woods to the square of your city is a task worthy of creatures from a fairy tale by Gianni Rodari (who wrote a beautiful one on the planet of Christmas trees): «It takes a week of work, the fir tree must be landed very gently, placed horizontally, it must be laid down very, very slowly, then tied branch by branch by hand to allow it to travel on the balance». It’s like putting a giant to sleep.

According to a survey by Coldiretti, 85 percent of Italians this year will have at home the Protestant tradition invented by the bakers of Freiburg and the merchants of Rigafor three million families it is still a real tree, the others choose plastic, “which however is produced with petroleum, has climatic problems, when it is manufactured, and ecological problems, when it is disposed of”, he says George Vacchianoprofessor of forest management and author of The resilience of the forest (Mondadori). “If we already have a plastic one at home, we continue to use it for a long time, the important thing is not to buy it today”.

For those starting from scratch, perhaps because they have a new house, better a live creature that comes from a nursery or cultivation, which has not emitted CO2, like plastic, and has actually absorbed it over the course of its life. This is also the year that the Christmas tree can be rented, celebrated during the holidays, and then returned to the nursery where it can continue its life, to be recovered the following year, an interesting form of symbiosis between urban, agricultural and forest Italy. A healthy environment is always the result of alliances. «Choosing a real tree, which comes from organic and sustainable cultivation, is also a way to support the agricultural part of this countrywhich today needs to be helped in every possible way», explains Brunori. And then at a certain point it’s time to part with the Christmas warrior fir. If you haven’t rented it, the first rule is: don’t replant it in the woods, for any reason. As Vacchiano explains, «the single plant is not important, the forest as an ecosystem is important, with a tree brought there without correct information we risk only interference, disturbances, genetic pollution». And therefore we can accept that the tree, at the end of its task, becomes «hummus, compost, fertile land, to make other things and new living beings grow». Because that’s what nature does and that’s why we chose this tradition of having a tree at home at Christmas: to remind us of it.

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