It took me 10 years to stop – a full decade to learn the answer to a question I’d asked myself each Christmas when I saw a yard filled with blanket-covered trees across from my daughter’s high school: why?
I wondered: Do trees get cold? Does keeping them warm help their growth? Did their Southern tree-mamas say they’d get the switch if they went outside without their sweaters? Or maybe the person living in the home was, as we say in the South, “not quite right,” also known as “the fun relative.”
The large front yard in Harvest, Ala., is a crazy-quilt of color, with dozens of tree trunks wrapped in crocheted or knitted cast-offs. The number of wrapped trees grows each Christmas, as did my curiosity, until, finally, I hit the curious-vs.-nosy tipping point and turned into the long drive to find answers…