'Why is the big tree lit?' a girl of about seven asked me at the edge of the Meravel wood, and I said I did not know, and she looked at me with a pity I had earned. Then she took my hand and led me in. What follows is the wood in the order she showed it. The first thing is the lane, a straight path of packed snow running into the trees, with a lantern post every thirty paces. I counted forty-four on the east side and forty-four on the west. Each post is wound with a fir garland and a red bow, and each lantern glows gold. The second thing is the young spruce along the lane, each one hung with a string of lights, a few candy canes and a glass ornament, all at child height, because the children of Dolmire do the hanging on the first Sunday of Advent and the grown-ups are not allowed near the lower boughs.
The third is the great fir at the end of the lane, a tree about eighty feet tall whose snow-bowed boughs are hung with thousands of lights, ornaments and ribbons and a huge gold star at the top. Presents are tucked into the roots, and no one in the district can say who leaves them. The fourth is the drifts, which the wind carves each night into the same smooth curves with blue hollows between them, and each morning the shape is identical. This is the one routine of the wood, and the children are very proud of it.
Fridolin Haas, who walks the lane every dusk to check the lanterns, says they have never been lit by hand. "They know when it's time," he says. I have never seen the first lighting, as I was usually at the cottage with the kettle, so I cannot confirm it. But every evening I was there, when I looked out at the lane at the moment the light turned from blue to violet, the lanterns were already lit, and Fridolin was standing at the first post with his hat in his hand, looking pleased.
The wood has no residents that I could find and no buildings, only the lane and the great tree and the quiet. At the foot of the fir, in the snow, on the last evening, I found a single red mitten with a hole at the thumb, set upright on a root, as though someone had left it there to dry.
- Classification
- Decorated boreal spruce forest
- Habitat
- Cold upland basins and ridgelines
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- About nine miles across
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Northern uplands
- Binomial
- Silva gelida
- Diet
- Snowmelt, sunlight and lantern light
- Temperament
- Hushed, glowing, welcoming