A Christmas tale
By Mitch Jayne

Gifts are the payment for human kindness

I guess some people today would have called old Simon Fletcher a “tree hugger,” as ridiculous as that seems for a description of a man who had cut down hundreds of them for winter fuel. No telling, either, how many fell to his farming, or his main hobby, which was carving wood. He carved mostly for musical instruments, toys or sometimes furniture. His was a simple love for working with wood.
His guitars, fiddles and mandolins are still scattered around the country, with backs of maple, fronts of spruce and necks of anything he thought would stand the tension and wear—like hickory, Osage orange or even dogwood. He even made sturdy easels for artists now and then. Better yet for me—since I didn’t play anything or paint—he made children’s toys and puzzles.
Simon, as far as I know, never hugged a tree. Unless maybe he did it to measure its girth with his arms. But I suppose “tree hugger” would have suited him, though nobody used it 50 years ago.
He lived with sawdust and wood chips. He planted and loved trees with a passion. He also cut them down with endless purpose.
Just before Christmas, one long-ago year, I stopped by his wood shop “after books,” as my school kids called it, to see if I could find some presents that would please the smaller children in the one-room school I taught.
His shop, with smoke whipping from the chimney of a giant stove, was in a grove of pines, and the shop dwarfed the little cabin next door where he lived. I could hear a power tool running as I walked up to the shop. It was fragrant with turned wood and the windows were aglow with yellow welcome.
The whine shut down as I opened the door, and Simon waved from his saw table. “Warm by the stove, I’ll be there directly,” he shouted. I stood awhile looking around.
Along the walls was an animated forest of whittled animals, string-animated toys and puzzles inspired by Christmas. The music factory was set aside, to make room, I supposed, for Santa’s workshop.
I wandered around, taking off my gloves and letting things catch my eye. I picked up a strange-looking box that was mostly knots of curly wood with small hidden drawers. When Simon arrived wiping his big hands to shake mine, I asked about its weird shape. As usual with Simon, I got more than I asked for.
“Why, that’s made of a maple burl,” he said. “Ain’t that a pretty piece of nature? You see them in every kind of tree: oaks, walnuts, catalpas, whatever. Most folks sees them as a disease defect, but Lord, when you cut ’em open, a big ’un will make the prettiest tabletop or the hardiest bowl you ever seen. And you ought to see the marble-y gun stocks I can turn out from such as these!”
He turned the little chest in his hand like a jeweler admiring his work and I asked idly, “What makes a burl?” His answer still sticks in my mind. “Well now, who knows? Maybe a bug laid eggs in a bud of it someway. Lightnin’ hit the tree or a varmint gnawed on it, a human hit it a lick with an axe or scarred it with a log chain. But whatever ’twas, it changed its whole way of puttin’ itself together. And kind of reinvented itself.”
He studied the burl cheerfully. “Looked like a big barky wart when I got it. But I took a saw to it, polished up its knots and conjured out them little drawers, and next thing you know, it’s a magic hidee-hole in a magical lookin’ creation. Fit for a kid’s secret plunder!”
I don’t know how long I stayed or what I bought that winter evening, because what Simon said was always as nimble and clever as what he had made with his hands. His mind, very much on Christmas work, danced like his toys.
I do know I bought a dozen small puzzles made with his jigsaw. They had key pieces you had to find to unlock them. I bought a carved bear that played a piano when you swung a weighted string and a jointed monkey that descended a ladder in funny jerks. I picked out a paddle where six chickens bobbed for corn when you swung it. And I got some long notched sticks with a propeller on one end that a child could make rotate by rubbing it with another stick. It was fun stuff that taught about motion and numbers and wonder. And finally, unsure who I had in mind for it, I had Simon wrap the homely little maple burl.
They were simple toys for simple times and, even on my small pay, I could afford them. This was because Simon had a theory about everything and a downright outlandish one about Christmas; he thought giving presents was just returning a loan of stuff you’d borrowed from humans you valued. “I like to help out with such as that,” he said.
I wasn’t sure I understood Simon exactly and asked, “Return stuff like what?”
“Oh, you know,” he said, “stuff folks give you all along: trust, belief, sometimes a little encouragement or insight, all like that.” He grinned at his own big words. “Stuff they didn’t charge nothing for and you couldn’t pay for it no way: love, joy, compliments, support when you needed it, friendship.” His eyes twinkled under brows like white mice. “Heck, you know all that, you’re a schoolmaster. You pay back by passing on what you got. Christmas time’s when the rest of us get to do that!”
With the coming darkness came the snow, and saying good-bye to the old craftsman, I drove home through it, my car seat full of lumpy brown-bag packages and my head full of Simon Fletcher’s strange way of looking at Christmas.
I remember giving away all those presents at our school Christmas party and what pleasure the kids got from those homemade things in that time of the world when nearly everything of keeping value began at home. I remember the Christmas play we put on for their parents, and the popcorn, paper-chain decorated tree, and the stove-warmth of the old schoolhouse and smell of cedar greenery.
But what I remember most of all is that maple burl old Simon Fletcher made for somebody’s Christmas present—because I decided I needed it myself, and it sits on the desk where I write this little Christmas story.
It reminded me for years that beauty sometimes constructs itself in homely, unexpected forms, and that we need to look for it to find it. Simon’s carving helped me to look for it in every small face, every unfinished mind I was entrusted with in my years of teaching.
Best yet, it also reminds me today, long years after my old tree hugger’s passing, that Christmas isn’t commercial, and its presents, whatever they are, still represent the best of intentions we’re likely to ever have in this old world. It’s the day we try to repay the kind loan of folk’s humanity to us—and pass it on.

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