I Wrote This Weird Short Story When I Was Eleven

My family keeps everything. Literally everything. My mom has shoes from before I was born. Because, you know, she may want to wear them again. In some cases, it's cool: I was able to pass literally every single baby book I had as a child (and it was a lot) onto my son.

Among the things that were never purged is a surprisingly large pile of my old school assignments. And, oh boy, did I find a real gem going through those. In 1995, when I was eleven years old, it appears that I had a creative writing assignment to write the autobiography of a tree. And I chose to write about a Christmas tree.

It was December; either I had Christmas on the mind, or we were assigned to write about Christmas trees in particular. I don't remember, and since it was a small farm school in the Rust Belt in the mid-90s, either option is equally plausible.

Either way, my piece was titled, "Woody, the Perfect Tree."

Reading this as an adult gave me some cause for alarm. Let's take a look, shall we? Italics represent the original writing; the rest is my reaction today as I re-read.

Analyzing "Woody, the Perfect Tree"

So first, no jokes on the name. I was eleven. He was a tree. It made sense to me. Then, let's take a moment to marvel at the 90's Microsoft Word clip art graphics. Oooh…images. Now, to the story:

Hi! I'm Woody! I'm a pine tree in a Christmas Tree Farm. Uh-oh! Someone's coming!

I have never really been a four-exclamation-points-in-five-sentences type of person. I have no idea what happened there. But I guess it's cute.

"Come on, Dad! I found a tree!" shouted a little boy. A little girl came too.

"Who are they looking at?" I whispered to the tree next to me.

"You, I think," he replied.

Sure enough, the two kids and a man were looking at me!

Exclamation points everywhere…maybe I was just a more excitable person back then?? But, the story is still cute.

"Perfect," he said, swinging back his ax.

I'd seen this happen before. I knew it was painful.

Hmm.

"No!" I screamed, though he couldn't understand. "I'm too young to go!"

Getting a little weird here…

The man's ax hit my waist. The pain shot through me.

"O-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w!" I yelled.

"Aw, does it hurt?" asked the one tree I really hate in a baby voice.

"YES!" I screamed at him.

By now, the man had cut straight through me!

"Whoa!" I shouted as I toppled over, falling in the snow.

The next thing I knew, he was attacking me with string! He tied up all my limbs. I was all squished up and very uncomfortable.

Okay, I feel the need to clarify that I have never chopped down a tree in my life. We had a fake tree my entire childhood; I only got my first real one as an adult, and they've all been pre-cut. So I have no idea where this all came from.

"This is worse than being inside a seed!" I yelled.

Buh-dum-tcha! Kids do say the darndest things.

"You've got to be kidding!" said one tree. "I thought nothing was worse than that!"

"Whoa!" I yelled as I was lifted off the snow.

Man, this tree does a lot of yelling. Also, the straight-man follow-up here kind of makes the seed joke fall a little flat.

I was now being carried off to a blue station wagon. The man who chopped me down (I was still in pain by the way) grunted as he pushed me on to the car and tied me to the roof. The boy and girl dove into the car, followed closely by their father. The car started up, and I got the first car ride of my life, which wasn't very fun, considering I was strapped to a roof.

I'm starting to get concerned by my intense focus on pain and discomfort. And somehow I've shifted from autobiography to true crime, apparently about a tree-napping.

The ride was a quick one, though, and soon we turned into a driveway. The kids popped out of the car and ran over to me. The man unstrapped me and carried me into the house. A tall, smiling woman stood in a large, brightly lit den.

"Oh, it's beautiful!" she exclaimed, rushing over to me. "And the stand's ready, too!"

Then the man pushed my trunk into a round stand. He turned some metal things at the base, which pushed metal bars at my trunk. They tightened and tightened. It hurt quite a bit, too.

Okay, there's more pain…

Soon, I found myself standing tall in the den.

Better.

"Oh, let's decorate it!" squealed the girl.

So, they untied me (how good it felt!), and wrapped me in lights and beads strung on a string. They plopped a gold star on my top branch, like a hat. Then, they covered me with balls attached to hooks. Finally, they watered me (I was very thirsty) and turned on my lights. Then, the family turned on the T.V. and I watched until I fell asleep (trees have to sleep too!).

Trees have to sleep too. To quote Jurassic Park: clever girl.

I stood tall and beautiful for about two weeks. Then it was Christmas Eve. I wanted to stay up all night, but I fell asleep. I awoke in the morning to the shrieks of the children. Dozens of presents sat beneath my limbs. I stood tall and proud the whole rest of the day.

Well, this seems like a positive character arc…

I stood like that for about a week or so, but then, on Thursday, January 4th, the father announced, "We should take our tree down today."

Uh-oh.

The children sadly removed my ornaments, then the lights and beads, and finally, the star. The father unscrewed the metal bars and removed me from my stand. He brought me outside and threw me into the smelly garbage pile.

Well now I'm just getting melodramatic. It's cold out; would the garbage really have been that smelly?

There, I waited until today, January 6th. I'm brown, and very thirsty.

Yikes…also, why was I so specific on dates??

I am afraid I'm dying.

Yup. I wrote that. Then, and this last phrase is actually italicized in the original document:

"Good-bye."

What. The. Actual. Fuck? I was ELEVEN. And I wrote a story about a Christmas tree that gets kidnapped and tortured to death, for a school assignment? And no one thought this was a little bizarre?

I mean, I get it — it was a different time. As babies, we were tossed face-down into our cribs and covered with blankets, then buried under a pile of toys and told, "Survive that!". We breathed second-hand smoke instead of oxygen. We daringly rode on someone's lap in the middle front seat (yes, middle seat — for younger millennials, Google "bench seats") of a boxy car with no airbags, and we weren't wearing a seatbelt. Your mom's arm was your seatbelt. It was fine.

But still. This story just seems odd.