EDITOR'S LETTER

There was nothing there. Just a hand-scribbled note on a paper plate. “Trees,” it said, followed by an unfamiliar street address. There was no inflatable Santa towering over the entryway. No wood smoke in the air. Worse, there weren’t any trees. Just a paper plate and an empty lot. It was like going over the river and through the woods, only to find out that Grandma was gone and no one had bothered to tell you.

“I guess they’ve moved again,” I said to my girls, as I turned the car around and turned on a Christmas song by Taylor Swift. Turns out, the mysterious note led to a local nursery, not a new address for Tim Mitchell’s Christmas Trees. My 9-year-old twins were shattered. We’d always gone to Tim’s on the first Friday night in December. We’d go when it was dark, when we’d need a sweater. And maybe a beanie. It wasn’t wintry, but the arid landscape would be disguised by the darkness and the cool air, unwitting conspirators in the illusion that we were at a Dickensian tree lot in Cornhill instead of a lot in the Sonoran Desert.

Tim Mitchell’s legacy began in 1950, when he set up shop at Central and Van Buren. Like Frisbees and Hula-Hoops, his downtown Phoenix tree lot took off. Although people lined up for his noble firs, it was the allure of the affable family that kept them coming back. For seven decades. And as the line of enthusiasts grew, so did the number of lots. For a while, in the 1970s, the Mitchells had as many as 22, including my favorite at 32nd Street and Camelback. Although Mr. Mitchell passed away in 1992, his family continued on. Until last year. “It was a wonderful life for my family,” Jayne Mitchell says. “As a kid, I’d split my time between Arizona and Oregon, where we grew our trees. And I got to meet so many incredible people. We had third and fourth generations of families coming to us.”
 

Sadly, after almost 70 years, all of Tim Mitchell’s tree lots are gone. It’s another hole in my daughters’ world. As parents, we desperately want to protect our children from disappointment and prolong their innocence. But kids are getting used to disappointment. The coronavirus has derailed their childhood and robbed them along the way. In the spring, my girls lost out on three months of third grade. They lost the daily luau in the lunchroom and the liberation of the playground. And they lost the lifelines to their best friends and their heroes — Ms. Meyer and Ms. Seeger. Then, over the summer, they lost out on Camp Tamakwa, the quintessential summer camp in Canada’s Algonquin Provincial Park. Like almost everything around them, it was canceled. Now, this month, their long-awaited trip to upstate New York, where they were hoping for a white Christmas, has been scrapped, as well.

I would like to think that my girls will handle the latest disappointment like the Whos in Who-ville — Fah who foraze! Dah who doraze! Welcome Christmas, come this way! — but they’re just kids, and no matter how much perspective I offer, it’ll be another setback in a year that’s already had so many. To them, the coronavirus is like Scut Farkus, the yellow-eyed bully who lurks around every corner. Someday, though, they’ll look back and realize how fortunate they were. Despite the disappointments, they won’t have to look across the table at an empty seat this holiday season. That’s not the case for the families of more than 210,000 Americans and a million men and women around the world.

The numbers are staggering. And the loss of life is set against a backdrop of escalating civil unrest, record unemployment and catastrophic wildfires, including fires in Arizona that ravaged the Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson and the Four Peaks Wilderness east of Phoenix — when the snow level drops to 4,000 feet, I can see the frosting on the Four Peaks from my front yard.

It’s been a bad year, but we have to believe that 2021 will be better. A good place to begin is with benevolence. I tell my daughters there are two ways to be: You either care about the people you don’t know. Or you don’t. It’s pretty simple. And they’re taught to be kind, too. “One rule. Two words. Be kind.” Not everyone who will read this magazine believes in Christmas, and even fewer care about Christmas trees, but I hope the tranquility of what you’ll see inside helps evoke the spirit of Christmas. That feeling of lightheartedness, love and good cheer. Of peace on Earth, human righteousness and decency.

The mission in life is not merely to survive, Maya Angelou said, “but to thrive, and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor and some style.” Those things aren’t the province of any one religion or ideology. They’re things we can all strive for in the coming year.

Meanwhile, whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or just a few days at home alone with your children, happy holidays, and thank you for spending another year with Arizona Highways.