If you had asked me ten years ago where some of my best holiday memories were made, there’s a high chance that the parking lot of Sherm’s Thunderbird Market in Roseburg, Oregon wouldn’t have been on the list. But life has a way of surprising you. Your opinions can change gradually, often without you realizing it’s happening.

My family is constantly busy. My parents both work full time, and we operate three separate agricultural ventures: a mid-sized cattle ranch, a hazelnut orchard, and a Christmas tree farm. The tree farm sits directly next to our house. We purchased it ten years ago, in the fall of 2015, when our neighbor’s health declined and he moved back to Southern California. Because Christmas trees weren’t viewed as a valuable asset in property, my parents were able to get a good deal and decided to start wholesaling trees to a family friend.

When we bought it, the farm was severely overgrown. Our neighbor hadn’t been able to care for the trees properly in the decade after his wife passed away, so it took a great deal of time, effort, and patience to bring it back into shape. After that first Christmas season, my parents decided to open a retail Christmas tree lot to sell directly to customers. Conveniently, the longtime tree lot that normally operated out of Sherm’s grocery store had shut down, and we were able to take over that space. My parents were excited to start selling Christmas trees. I was not.

The Christmas Tree Lot and I have had a contentious relationship. When it first opened, it took away from things I genuinely enjoyed, like decorating the house for Christmas (which had always been my job) and actually getting to enjoy December instead of working through it. I couldn’t leave the tree lot when I wanted to because I couldn’t yet drive for two more years, so I was stuck there. When it rains, the christmas tree lot genuinely sucks, being soaked and forced to carry a heavy ass tree is even less fun than it sounds. And being a high school kid who spends four weeks a year standing in the middle of a grocery store parking lot selling Christmas trees isn’t exactly cool. I was embarrassed by it. As someone who already didn’t enjoy high school all that much, the tree lot didn’t help.

Over time, though, things changd. My parents slowly changed how the lot was run and figured out what worked and what didn’t (although trying to convince them is an extremely slow and incredibly frustrating process). The tree lot got easier to manage as we found ways to make it more efficient. We started supplementing the tree lot with trees shipped down from the Willamette Valley. I grew up physically and could carry trees more easily. And we learned how to better plan schedules so the burden didn’t fall on just one person at a time.

That doesn’t mean it’s been all smiles since those dreaded first couple of years. I still had to come into the lot even when I didn’t want when I got my license. We had to wear masks during COVID which sucked when you were trying to lift trees. My mom still occasionally insists she can’t run the lot without me, which has caused more than a few logistical nightmares; in fact, my entire pledge retreat when I was in FIJI had to be in Roseburg because my mom said that I had to work in the damn tree lot that weekend, only to reverse her position literally at the last second. I still get shit for that from my Pledge Class. Last year, I had to work the same day I flew 2,500 miles home from Louisville after waking up at 5 a.m. Eastern. I nearly had to do it again this year, until a heated phone call in the Denver airport finally got me off the hook. So yes, it still creates stress.

But there are good parts, too. When the weather is nice, depending on the day, the tree lot is a lot of fun when there are a lot of working at the same time. We’re all so familiar with the lot at this point that everyone has a naturalized “role” and we can fill in wherever to help out. A lot of the customers are really nice to interact with. At some points, it beats sitting at home and doing nothing for the entire break. And it’s nice when I get to work alone, as I am while I’m writing this. It’s cool to sit and look out of our trailer window and watch the cars drive by, or watch the Sherm’s parking lot slowly fill up by the early afternoon, and clear out by the early evening. You get to see people of all different walks of life come in and search for their Christmas tree, oftentimes with their family. It forces you to slow down and reflect on the year, which I don’t do often enough. The lot itself hasn’t changed much in ten years, but I have.

This lot has been a huge part of my life for ten years. In that time span, I started and finished high school, started and finished undergrad, and am now exactly halfway through lawschool all the way across the country. A lot has changed, but the lot has not. It has remained a consistent point in my family’s life from the time we opened it to where we are now. It may cause a lot of headaches and logistical nightmares, but it has been the one through-line our family has consistently had since 2015. County fairs came and went. High school sports ended. We’re all different people now. But the lot has remained. Ironically, it’s now something people think is “cool,” the kind of thing that gets described as a “Hallmark movie life,” even though the reality of the lot is a lot messier. People I went to high school with have worked there. And even though I’m here ten hours a day until we sell out, with the freedom to go anywhere, there’s strangely nowhere I’d rather be.

Life always changes, especially our opinions of things we previously hated. I never thought that a place I resented for so long to become the thing I look forward to returning to each December. But not because anything about this lot is easy or stress-free, but because it’s familiar. It’s steady. It’s ours. In a life that keeps accelerating, the simplicity of the Umpqua Family Tree Lot is grounding. For a few weeks every year, I don’t have to think about finals, or jobs, or where I’ll end up next. I’m just here, packing out trees, watching the sun set over a grocery store parking lot I know better than almost anywhere else.

I still don’t love everything about my family’s Christmas tree lot, and I probably never will. But there’s a lot to love about it, for better or worse. It’s been the constant in my family’s chaos, the thing that brings us together. And maybe that’s exactly what Christmas is about.

-Colby