In a far off time and place, there was a village by a forest. The people made their living from what they could gather from the forest; it was a frugal life, and much harder than nowadays, so there were many fewer people, but everyone mattered. A young woman lived in a house on the very edge of the forest, and she was courted by a young man from the same village.

Sometimes he would bring her simple presents when he returned from working among the trees: daffodils, bluebells, or twigs of pussy willow with furry white feet that turned bright yellow with pollen; broken and abandoned egg-shells from a robin’s nest, blue as her eyes; a handful of cob nuts or beech mast; an apple or a pear; sprays of gorgeous red and gold and brown leaves to decorate her home; and he would even stumble to her door through the stark black trees and snow with some small gift – a sprig of holly, all red berries and shiny green spikes, or a twist of mistletoe to hang over the door. Her heart would leap whenever she heard his whistle as he returned through the forest.

One day, when he had been far away into the most inaccessible part of the forest, he brought her a special present, something she had never seen before. It was an elongated wooden ball, slightly pointed at one end, about the size and shape of a hen’s egg, but made of layers of blunt spikes. She gazed at it in wonder. He told her it came from a tree that grew prickly green needles instead of leaves and lived on the lower slopes of the mountains where the ordinary trees of the forest could not thrive. He called it a ‘cone’. When she brought it indoors, they both watched enraptured as it opened out gradually, as if it were a little wooden flower and the indoor warmth were the sun. While her heart was thus filled with wonder, he asked her to marry him, and, of course, she accepted.

They planned to get married the following spring. All through that winter, she sewed and cooked and planned for her wedding day, the cone always by her hand, and he chopped and sawed and carried and gathered in the forest, and whistled his love to her each evening as he came home through the trees.

On the eve of their wedding, the young man went off into the forest as usual to gather firewood, for although the days were balmy, the nights were still cold. A light breeze stirred the budding branches of the forest and set the daffodils nodding in their yellow drifts.

When night had fallen, however, he had not returned. The young woman was distraught, but confident he had just been delayed, perhaps seeking some special wedding present for her. She sat up all night waiting for him. In the morning, she dressed herself in her wedding finery, and then, cone in hand, stood at the door of the house they had planned to share and waited for him, dry-eyed, gazing into the forest, listening for his whistle. The next day she did the same; and the next. Weeks dragged by. She would eat nothing but the thinnest gruel, and drank only a little water. She would not wash, nor would she change out of her wedding clothes. All that spring and summer she stood by the door, clasping the cone to her stomach, waiting for her loved one to return. Gradually, as autumn filled the forest with gold and brown and late sun and rushing winds, while mushrooms and holly berries swelled and chestnuts burgeoned on the trees, and the villagers gathered and stored around her in preparation for the lean days to come, her hope began to fade; and on the day the first flake of snow bespoke the onset of winter, her heart finally broke, and she died.

She was buried within sight of the house, on the very fringe of the forest. Still she wore her wedding dress, although it was sadly faded and grubby, and still she held the wondrous cone he had given her tight to her stomach, a talisman that said that, if need be, she would wait there for her love forever.

Winter blew in, and it was the coldest and the longest and the stormiest anyone could remember. Half the trees in the forest blew down, and the snow lay long and thick on the ground. Spring was late, and the villagers who survived the winter ran out of food and had to move away for fear of starvation, so that when spring finally did arrive, only a few stragglers saw the shoot that sprang up from the middle of her grave. Because of the way she had died, they called it a ‘pine’ tree, thinking it, too, would soon wither and fade as she had. But many of the trees nearby had been uprooted by the winter storms and cut up and used for fuel, so that where once it might have been shaded out, it thrived. It grew quickly into a sapling, and then a small tree. Within a few years it had become a splendid tall specimen that now shaded out the new growth of the older trees, and instead more of its own kind grew up in its shadow. Thus one tree became a grove, then many trees spreading out into the surrounding forest. They shed their needles as they grew new ones, so poisoning the ground for other plants. The winters as they came around were longer and harsher, and the summers shorter and milder, so the new forest of pine trees grew and grew until it covered the land and there were no other trees to be seen. And still her man never returned.

* * * * * * * *

“But they shed needles all over the carpet and stick in your toes and…”

“It’s traditional. We have to have a tree!”

“But why can’t we have a nice plastic one?”

“Constance, I want a tree. I want the fresh smell of pine, the luxurious green, the never quite perfect shape, and the glorious fun of decorating a real living thing!” Connie paused at this. Woody never used her full name unless he was either very angry or very upset.

“OK,” she said, “we’ll get a real tree. But can we please find some way of stopping the needles getting everywhere?” As she said this, they turned the corner into their local market, and there, emblazoned across the front of a recently-closed charity shop, was a banner that read –

“There, Woody,” she said. “That could be an ideal solution.” She dragged him over to the shop. He brushed his hand over the spines of one of the trees displayed there. “They certainly feel real,” he exclaimed, sucking a pricked finger.

“That’s because they are,” came a voice from behind the mass of trees. A wizened little man muffled up in a greatcoat, scarf and flat cap stepped out. “And no more expensive than ordinary trees,” he added.

“But it says, ‘Chocolate Christmas Trees’ up there,” said Woody, pointing to the banner.

“Aar, well, there’s a limit to what you can put on a sign, in’t there,” the little man responded. “Thing is, the trees is real enough. It’s just that they bin treated with a special genetically-engineered bio-morphic growth hormone. See, pine needles fall off because they trees is dyin’. The way to stop it is to make the tree grow – but then, if the hormone got out, we’d have loads of giant trees, so they scientists put a special bit into the dna. ‘The growth hormone iterates six times. Any attempted seventh iteration activates the transmogrification gene, and the entire plant turns into a sterile form of cocoa’, the old man parroted. “Dunno what it means, but tha’s what they tol’ me. All you gotta do is plant the tree in a tub and decorate it like normal. You should buy a tree a bit smaller than you need, ’cos it’ll grow ’bout a foot while it’s up. Then, take it down on twelfth night, and put it out in the garden. A couple days later, it’ll be all cocoa, and you can make your own hot chocolate drinks from it for the rest of the winter.”

“What a good idea,” said Woody dryly.

“What are those funny little trolls fixed to the trunks?” asked Con.

“Tha’s a back-up control. If the hormone goes haywire, it’ll kill the tree, to make sure it don’t escape.”

“Sounds perfect,” said Woody. “We’ll take one.” Of course, he didn’t believe a word, but if it got him a real tree without any more fuss from Con, he was all for it.

When they got the tree home, before he had even taken off his hat and gloves, he pulled the troll off the trunk and threw it in the bin. Con immediately rescued it.

“You heard what the man said,” she told him. “It’s important that you keep the troll in place.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “That was just a fairy story made up by the trader to give him a seasonal edge. It’s probably just an ordinary tree sprayed with hair lacquer or something. And that hideous little doll is a bit of Hong Kong plastic window-dressing. He’s not going to be there for us to take the tree back and complain that it didn’t turn into chocolate, is he?”

The troll rested warm in Con’s hand. It didn’t feel cheap or plastic at all. And she was really looking forward to all that free chocolate! So she hid it at the back of a kitchen cupboard, intending to re-attach it to the tree when Woody wasn’t looking, but then, in the hurly-burly of seasonal parties and present-giving and family visits, forgot about it completely.

As Christmas came and went, the tree grew exactly as predicted, about a foot, and didn’t shed a single needle on the carpet. The psychotropic contact drug in the spongey surface of the tree-troll ensured that Connie was plagued by dreams of a little woodsman attempting to cut her off at the knees with his axe, shouting, “Giants must die! Giants must die!” As she became more and more tired, Woody became brighter-eyed, his hair glossier, his very fingernails stronger, and towered over her even more than usual. With her exhaustion came paranoia – she was convinced that she had forgotten to do something vitally important. But then, she had.

On twelfth night, they took down their decorations as tradition dictated. The tree decorations were much the worse for the wear of many nieces’ and nephews’ fingers grabbing and pulling at the fancy chocolate treats (the tree had given as good as it got, dishing out many a pricked finger and grazed knuckle in return), but the tree itself looked gorgeous, with new shoots of a particulary vivid green at the end of each branch. So they planted it at the end of the garden, to mark where they had buried their venerable and much-loved cat, Ginger, when he had died the previous autumn.

That night, the first of that winter’s many severe storms swept over the house, filling the garden with snow, so they never saw the magical change as the tree turned entirely into cocoa. Nor, as January passed, did they see how the plants near it also spüouted and grew despite the extreme weather, nor their transmogrification, in turn, into cocoa. Con was still sleeping badly, so when she saw Ginger stepping delicately through a blizzard in the garden, his fur all silver and gold, she thought she must be hallucinating – but she couldn’t pretend it was an hallucination when she woke one morning to find Woody lying stiff and silent in bed beside her, entirely turned into cocoa!

She sat up in bed and howled louder than the gale buffeting the windows. Her husband, feet now dangling over the end of the bed, was gone, turned into chocolate, while in her mind the troll swung his axe and chanted, “Giants must die! Giants must die!” She fled the room, threw open the back door, and, stumbling over the cat, ran blindly into the blizzard-filled garden – full-tilt into the tree. She rebounded and fell, stunned, into the snow at its foot. Blood trickled into her eyes and, as she faded away, she looked up at the tree and wondered how on earth chocolate could be so hard.

* * * * * * * *

She woke. A falling pine cone bounced off her forehead. She was surrounded by pine cones. The setting sun was warm on her body – she was wearing no clothes! How had she come here? She could remember little. Not even her own name. Two phrases echoed inside her head – “Giants must die” and “Eve… her wedding!” Eve? Was that her name? It was a good name. She gazed up at the rust-red trunks of the trees towering above her. And her heart leapt as she heard a whistle, and her young man (my young man?) came into view through the gloom beneath the giant trees. He was wearing no clothes either, but he carried a gift for her, as he often did (often?). He kissed her and presented her with the rare, exotic fruit that he had found in a far distant part of the forest.

“A fitting wedding present,” he said. “Eat this. Then we will grow the seeds into more trees, and feed ourselves, and bring flowers and light into this darkest part of the forest.” She gazed up at him, glad that her long wait was over (long wait?). Accepting all he had brought and all he promised, she took a bite from the apple. And it was wonderful. *

The Chocolate Christmas Tree is copyright © 1999 Paul Brazier & Juliet Eyeions

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