Where the yule logs grow
Holiday tree farms aren't just for sawing. You can hike them.
The closest thing my family has to a religious ritual in December is squeezing onto a couch somewhere (it doesn’t have to be our couch) and watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. At this point, it’s less about experiencing a narrative picture than having a friend-to-friend reunion with Clark Griswold, the messiah of suburban dads from Palo Alto to Presque Isle. The anticipation of hearing everyone guffaw and cackle at the jokes and setpieces that we all know are coming is a special kind of holiday joy. The movie also has surprisingly terrific class politics, uniting the middle class, the rural poor, and the police against the rich. (I wrote about this for VICE back in 2018.) But for relentless bladder laughter, the arguable peak of Christmas Vacation is its opening 10 minutes, in which we find Chevy Chase and his long-suffering family hiking into snowbound wilderness to find the elusive Griswold Family Christmas Tree.
Part of the joke is how the Griswolds’ Christmas tree hunt resembles borderline death march across a landscape that brings to mind Siberia. (The film is set in the Chicago metro area.) And the reason why this joke lands so well is because millions of us buy our holiday trees in parking lots, where evergreen arbors been dumped after being cut down and baled at a tree farm somewhere out in the countryside. Some of us will go the extra mile and drive to one of those farms, sawing down our own tree and hauling it back to our less bucolic enclaves, bungee-corded to the top of the car. But even in these instances, you pretty much just show up, walk 100 feet into a corridor of trees, and make a rapid decision because it’s really cold and you need the full dexterity of your hands to operate the bow saw you’ve brought along or borrowed from the tree farm proprietors. Not many people will visit a tree farm expecting to go for a hike.
But in fact, you can go for an sublime winter hike at a holiday tree farm. There’s a real splendor to those dotingly-maintained rows of evergreen trees that present in varying shapes and sizes. Tree farms tend to be pretty vast, often taking up space on open hills or ridges with arresting views of the nearby countryside. Simply hiking around a farm, darting in and out of tree halls, and pausing to enjoy the early winter ambiance can be a lovely experience. But certain tree farms in New England offer literal hiking trails that explore the grounds and the surrounding woods. And this week, I found one of those trails hidden in plain sight, in the little town of Bethlehem. New Hampshire.