The six-month Christmas tree.

Drag a fat and pampered evergreen into your home, and you may be dealing yourself a dose of the Holiday Depression Syndrome.

According to my friend and hunting buddy Seward Heaps, who is also a successful local psychologist, instances of suicides, domestic violence, and other destructive behavior increase tenfold during the Christmas season. Seward, who is forever trying to enter into "meaningful dialogue" with his two Brittany spaniels, both of which have funnier names than he, is not by nature the jolliest of souls. But he does command a whole lot of attention from his clientele 30 miles away in town. Here in Loon Lake, however, we have rejected his broad "Holiday Depression Theory," which has a lot of variables and requires several cases of $10 words to explain. We know that winter wackiness can actually last until spring and that the Christmas tree is the sole perpetrator.

Hundreds of Christmas holidays annually end in tears and ruin because we insist on putting large evergreens in our houses to celebrate the season. As ridiculous as this custom is, it should still be nothing more than a seasonal annoyance ending shortly after the Rose Bowl. In my house and apparently many others, however, the negative effects last until Memorial Day and involve five separate stages of annoyance: 1) finding the tree, 2) getting it home, 3) putting it up, 4) putting it up again, and 5) getting rid of it. Any of these steps is capable of causing the depression and anger my friend Seward speaks of.

Few of us bother anymore to cut a "free" wild tree, because we can't afford it. After figuring the $2 permit, a 240-mile round trip in a 4x4 that gets eight miles to the gallon, towing fees for extracting this same gas-guzzler from the snow or mud, and possible legal fees to keep us from being incarcerated during the holidays for mistakenly cutting on private land, a single "free" tree can easily reach four figures.

No, most Christmas trees are now purchased off lots in town by individuals who don't know for sure if they're getting a Scotch pine or a Russian olive, because every tree on the lot has been sheared to look the same. A buyer SHOULD be able to stop at any lot, plop down $35.95, and take home an acceptable tree. In my house, however, Christmas-tree SHOPPING is a tradition carried over from my wife's childhood, and unless we stop and browse and haggle and freeze to death at a minimum of 10 lots, we can't possibly find an acceptable tree or enjoy the season.

Once the tree has been located, admired, criticized, and argued over, it must be brought home. I have suggested to Lacey and the kids that we could save a lot of hassles including cleanup and disposal by taking our ornaments and lights to the lot where we made the purchase and setting up there, but none of them think it would be very "Christmassy" to put our packages under the dining-room table and go downtown when we have the urge to watch needles fall.

For that reason, we, like millions of other Americans, are obliged to carry home our sacred evergreen using a car barely big enough for a driver and two sacks of groceries. With a little descretion concerning tree size, this would be manageable, but as I mentioned, my wife Lacey is into tradition, and a traditional family is not satisfied with less than a ceiling-height conifer. Even this isn't too bad, though, unless the ceiling is 18 feet high--which ours is. I have suggested we put up a tree in the bathroom, which has a standard eight-foot ceiling, but my wife fixes me with one of her dreaded "If-you-had-a-brain-you'd-take-it-out-and-play-with-it" looks, and each year I am obliged to bring home the tree on top of the car. This is rather like a first-grader giving a piggyback ride to his dad. It is also the ultimate challenge for a man who was kicked out of Cub Scouts without any knot-tying instruction because the den mother thought the neckerchief slide he was carving resembled "heaving bosoms."

Last year, the tree became independent of the car, and I dragged it several miles on the freeway before I could get out of the middle lane. Except for a few branches on one side, it would have made a pretty fair carp spear. The year before, the tree was captured by a strong gust of wind that spun it around perpendicular to the car and then rotated it a few times like the blades of a helicopter until the ropes twisted tight and snapped, flinging our Yule symbol into the path of a Campbell's Soup semi.

Occasionally I do get a tree home, and then wish I hadn't, for once the tree is through the door it must go up. Thirty years ago, this was merely difficult; today it is like trying to assemble a child's Hot Wheels track with no instructions, no tools, and a three-hour deadline. Thirty years ago, Christmas trees came with sparse branches and thin trunks that sometimes actually fit in their stands. Today's Christmas tree, however, is not only sheared, it is "cultured," which means it is raised in a refined environment at a boarding school for evergreens. There it eats and drinks prodigiously and never says anything politically incorrect. When it is harvested in late August for eventual shipment to my unsuspecting household, it has a fat trunk and is four times heavier than its distant cousin, which is still hanging out with the bears in the woods and will still have most of its needles in December.

Fat-trunked trees do not fit in Christmas-tree stands unless the trunks are whittled down, and even then, tree stands built for wild trees will not hold fat ones with whittled-down trunks, no matter how hard you twist the screws. Try reducing a cultured trunk to workable dimensions, and you end up with a Christmas tree that is like a time bomb waiting to go off. While you, your spouse, and your children argue over such important considerations as whether the tinsel icicles should be placed or tossed, the tree is thinking about its imminent detonation. This usually occurs right after the angel is attached, though sometimes a particularly devious tree will wait until you have company over, or worse yet, until Christmas Eve. There is nothing more unChristmassy on Christmas Eve than a tree lying in the middle of the living room, and no matter who gets the blame or what labors are expended to resurrect it, a tree that must be righted after a fall never looks quite finished because half the ornaments are shattered and the lights don't work.

In my parent's house, I can remember one sorry evergreen that didn't go back up at all. My father, a very busy man who believed strongly in self-reliance, calmly surveyed the devastation and said, "Let the blank-of-a-blank lie. If it wants up bad enough, it'll do it by itself."

Despite the protests of every child in the household, a mere two or three weeks after finally achieving a semblance of conifer perpendicularity, the Christmas tree is intentionally brought down again, and in the process usually loses the last handful of needles and several "they've-been-in-the-family-for-centuries" ornaments. Dragged ingloriously across the carpet to the front door followed by wailing sons and daughters, the withered specimen is tossed into the front yard. "We'll deal with it later," I proclaim.

But several months go by, and in March, Lacey sweetly suggests, "That mess better darn well be out of my daffodil bed by Easter or I'll hire a man to come pick it up." I, who have been trying to balance the budget since the Christmas-buying frenzy, reject this idea and insist we can save money by disposing of the tree ourselves. I have heard of all sorts of creative methods of Christmas-tree disposal, and have decided to take it to the local arboretum, where the city has promised to grind ex-Christmas trees into a mulch for use in decorative pathways.

In May, however, the "tree," still suffering from good intentions, has only been moved as far as a cluttered spot behind the garage, the arboretum is no longer accepting donations, the two-week burning period has long passed, and my spouse is once again complaining. Now, though, the "mess" has been officially designated an "eyesore." I tie the remains precariously atop a still-too-small car and drive it to the incinerator, where $5 for the county will somehow make the resulting smoke less offensive.

The last six months have been a roller-coaster of emotion, but my family, though scarred, has once more survived the looming presence of an 18-foot evergreen. By the following December, only the good parts will be remembered, and Lacey and I, checkbook in hand, will bravely venture forth to begin the six-month cycle again.