Opening day. If you asked Katy what my favorite day of the year is, she wouldn't say Christmas Eve, and she wouldn't say the first Saturday we open the gate. She'd say today.
There's no good reason for it. Nothing has happened yet. Nobody's won anything. But the first Saturday of OU football is the day the whole rest of the year gets its shape, and around here that shape has always had a second half to it: football starts, and then Christmas comes.
Two seasons that run on the same clock
People assume a Christmas tree farm is a December business. It isn't. December is when you find out how you did. The work is all the rest of it.
And the farm calendar happens to lay right on top of the football calendar, which is either a coincidence or the reason I've never minded either one. Shearing wraps up in the summer heat. By the opener the trees have set their shape for the year and there's not much left to do to them but wait. September and October are the long middle — ordering, mowing, fixing what broke, watching the pre-cut firs get scheduled onto a truck somewhere in the mountains. Then the season turns, and it turns fast. By the time the games start meaning something in November, we're stringing lights and counting cups.
So the two things have never been separate in this house. Saturdays are for the game. The rest of the week is for the trees. And when the season winds down, ours is just getting started.
The part that's different this year
Our son Luke is a senior at OU. He graduates in December.
He's an equipment manager for the football team, which means that on the Saturdays we're watching, he's already been at the stadium for hours and will be there for hours after. It's not a glamorous job. It's a job where everything going right means nobody notices you, and I don't know a better description of the work I respect most.
You can pick him out, if you're looking. He's on the visiting team's sideline, carrying the footballs. He will also, in all likelihood, be standing directly in front of the other team's head coach. He has a job to do and a place to stand, and he does exactly what he's told — it isn't his fault where they tell him to stand.
That's the part of him I recognize. He likes a good challenge, he doesn't rattle, and he does not back down. Which is more or less the job description out here too. Nothing about growing trees in Oklahoma clay rewards backing down.
Here's the thing I keep turning over. Luke was eleven years old when we planted the first trees.
Eleven. Small enough that a seedling and a boy weren't that different in height, and I have pictures to prove it. Those first trees are gone now — cut, hauled home, in somebody's living room years ago, replaced twice over by trees that were planted after he'd already grown taller than they were. That's the arithmetic of this business. A tree takes six to eight years to get to somebody's living room. A kid takes about the same amount of time to go from eleven to eighteen, and then another four on top of that, and you don't notice either one happening because you're looking at it every single day.
You measure the trees. You never think to measure the kid.
So this fall lands a little differently. Football season starts today, and it ends around the time Luke walks. Our season starts in November and ends about a week after that. Everything we do here is set up in cycles that come back around every year — the same rows, the same shearing, the same lights in the same places, the same families we've watched grow up in the parking lot. This one doesn't come back around. It's the last fall where all of it lines up like this, and Katy and I are both aware of it in a way we haven't quite talked about out loud.
He'd tell us we're being dramatic. He'd be right. We're going to be dramatic anyway.
Come watch a game with us
If you're looking for somewhere to start a game-day Saturday, The Pines is open, the coffee's good, and you get to drink it looking at twelve acres of evergreens instead of a parking lot. It's about fifteen minutes from campus and considerably easier to park at.
The farm opens for the season on November 21. Choose-and-cut Virginia Pines are first come, first served — we don't hold those, we just keep growing them. The pre-cut firs are a different story: those come in on a truck, there's a fixed number of them, and when they're gone they're gone. If you want one, pre-orders are open now.
Between now and then, we've got a lot of Saturdays. Come see us on one of them.
Slow down on the farm. Boomer.
— Jesse
