A time when robbing trees and dodgy lights dominated our lives

Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s a tradition that now goes back in the family many years, even decades, but the origins of the practice are a little dodgy, even vaguely criminal one might say.

Never a Christmas has passed without an authentic tree being placed in a bucket of clay and situated inside the front window of the house – a process that has always caused moments of exasperation at installation time as wet clay got stuck either to carpet, timber, or lino.

We were blessed in that our house was situated close to one of those forestry plantations which always carried a wide and varied selection of firs, almost asking to be cut down for the Festive Season.

There was, though, always the threat that the ‘forestry man’ might be on his rounds some night, when the evil felling deed was being perpetrated and as young lads the fear was there that we might be rounded up and marched up before the local magistrate.

We weren’t even sure if the ‘forestry man’ ever really existed, but in a way that made him all the more terrifying. If we had never seen him, then the possibility remained that he could be akin to some kind of ogre who would show no mercy to young lads with dodgy bushman saws.

By their very nature, such mid-winter visits to the woods had to be clandestine affairs, involving the younger members of two or three neighbouring families all with the same goal in mind – to get a nice tree for Christmas.

They were always night-time expeditions with the one-mile trip to the woods carried out under the cover of darkness.

It was, though, a very environmentally-friendly mission as not one iota of an emission was released into the atmosphere as we pedalled our way on bikes with rusty chains and slippery pedals.

Lights were always of the dim variety, not because of any wholesome wish on our parts to conserve energy, but because the Ever-Ready batteries on our flashlamps were coming to the end of their natural lifespans.

The scouting work on the trees, though, had to be carried out during periods of decent daylight when the best tops of the available firs could be easily identified.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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