The Outline:

For the Christmas tree vendors of Gopher Broke Farms, the day begins at 8 p.m. when a truck from Quebec carrying upwards of 800 Christmas trees will roll up to the corner of 124th and Madison. A crew of five workers will scamper to the top of the large piles of Fraser firs and balsams and begin slangin’ trees — tree-vendor slang for throwing trees, essentially — from that truck into other trucks destined to travel throughout Manhattan. “Tree!” the workers shout as they throw them from the seemingly endless pile.

Selling Christmas trees is a wildly logistical process, involving growers in Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Vermont.

As a native son of a province that is one of the largest Christmas tree suppliers, I love these stories of how the tree gets from that farm in Nova Scotia, Quebec or Vermont to the streets and parking lots of your hometown.