Ken Walshe meets the people who track down the best and biggest trees for public spaces.
Christmas in Paris, think of the Galeries Lafayette bejewelled with lights. Christmas in London, think of the glittering facades of Oxford Street. Christmas in New York, think of the gold-embossed Rockefeller Centre, and a tree almost the same size as the ABC TV building. Then there is Christmas in Dublin. Anyone? Nothing really trips off the tongue, does it? There used to be Switzer's window, until Brown Thomas took over and the windows lost all traditional appeal, as the designs veered into the realms of theatrical abstraction. Now we have the live crib at the Mansion House, which you can smell from the other side of Stephen's Green, and a mish-mash of blinking lights over Henry Street, Camden Street and Grafton Street.
Who put these things up? Who is in charge? Did a crack team of cherry-picker operators, electricians and designers descend on the city late at night and garland it with multicoloured lights, faux foliage and pot-bellied Santas?
Perhaps such people held meetings in the bowels of Wood Quay, where months before Christmas they pored over lighting designs and the latest in crib accessories. Then it was okayed by The Head of Chrimbo Decorations.
No, Christmas lighting falls under the ambit of general lighting, and the only thing Dublin City Council is responsible for is the erection of approximately 20 trees around the city. For the most part, street lights and sundry baubles are put up by local business organisations. The council hires a lighting contractor to make sure these decorations are put up correctly, but that is the sum total of official council involvement.
Are we capable of planning anything on a large scale? Is that why it took us five times as long as anyone else to construct the Luas? Is that why a hobbit might crack his hairy little head off the ceiling of the Port Tunnel? As a nation, are we useless when it comes to the grand gesture?
Imagine if there was a committee, a committee with foresight, a committee with ideas, manpower and cash. Imagine what they could achieve!
Then something happened which threw us for six. We stumbled upon a press release for the ceremonial switching on of the Christmas lights for the tree on O'Connell Street. The lights were to be turned on by the Lord Mayor. There would be singing by the Dublin Gospel Choir and music by the Phoenix Swing Jazz Band. Central to the whole affair was the tree, described as a 50-foot Norway spruce which had come from Athy.
Picture this enormous tree sitting peaceably in a Coillte-owned field in Kildare, hear the swoosh of the axe, see the glint of the blade and imagine the mighty tree crashing to the ground. Who had chosen this tree? Who had cut it down?
Meet Tony Cunningham. Tony spends most of the year working for the Parks Department in Dublin City Council and he is also chief Christmas tree scout. He has a network of informers who spot likely candidates for the chop. No matter what time of year it is, or what he is doing, if he gets word of a suitable tree, he downs tools and he's off. He's the Christmas tree equivalent of a storm chaser.
Finding the right kind of tree is not easy. They are usually deep in the woods and Tony has spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours tracking them down over the past 20 years. This, he explains, is because the big trees are really anomalies. They owe their size and longevity to a freak set of circumstances, the demise of trees close by, which gives them that extra bit of sky and ground they need to develop.
Once the trees are picked, the serious business of extracting them from the forest ensues. Trucks, cranes, saws and manpower bring them down and then carry them on into the metropolis. Cunningham says 20 trees are culled, transported and erected in the space of 24 hours. He also built the crib on O'Connell Street.
Talking to Tony opened up a whole new perspective on Christmas. Maybe, just maybe, the way we do it at the moment is one more thing we would come to miss only after it had been replaced by something corporate and anodyne. So here's to variety, here's to ad-hocery, here's to people such as Tony Cunningham, who magically transform the city late at night while most of us are still tucked up in bed.