Each November, a fundraiser for Saskatoon’s City Hospital is held at the Saskatoon branch of the Western Development Museum. It is always successful in terms of dollars raised, and always well attended. It is called the “Festival of Trees,” and there is no way in which those dull words can do it justice.

Let me try to set the scene.

The main attraction of the Western Development Museum, Saskatoon branch, is a 1910 “Boomtown,” basically a main street set down in the middle of the wild west, with a firehall, a bank, hardware store, general store, Chinese laundry, church, schoolhouse, butcher shop, newspaper office, dentist’s office, doctor’s office, harness and saddle shop . . . I missed something, but you get the picture. The attention to detail in these shops is astonishing. The pharmacy (I missed that) has shelves full of tinctures and remedies for every human ailment imaginable. The chemicals are real, so real that I can’t go into the “shop” because my lungs are not the greatest and I can hardly breathe in there. The general store is so well stocked that after 15 years of visiting, I still haven’t noticed every item. The entire Boomtown is like this. The smell of wood, metal, and that distinctive odor given off by locomotives (we have one of those at the “train station”) takes you back to 1910 in an instant. I believe it is one of the best museums to be found anywhere. The level of dedication to it by the community here is what makes it so special. The place is crawling with volunteers. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the “blacksmith’s shop” where classes in forging metal are offered four times a year.

Each year, for the Christmas season, Boomtown is decorated with Christmas trees, wreaths, and other seasonal adornments. Everything is old fashioned, true to the era. The ceiling is very high, painted black or dark blue (I can’t be sure), and every Christmas giant snowflakes are hung from it, creating the sense that time stood still for one glorious instant.

Each November, the Festival of Trees is held in Boomtown. A diverse group of Saskatonians design and decorate themed Christmas trees that are lined up alone both sides of the main street. The themes can be anything–fairy tale, sports (this year we had “A rough year,” a Saskatchewan Roughriders theme), glam, eclectic, old fashioned, dolls, wine, chocolate, storybook, Disney, crafty, etc. There are also wreaths and gingerbread houses, all for sale.

In another part of the museum there is “Eaton’s Once Upon a Christmas,” a mechanical storybook world that is open to the public only at Christmastime. The mechanical figures were built in 1946 for the Winnipeg Eaton’s store and were purchased in 1987, and lovingly restored, by the Saskatoon WDM. It reflects a spirit of Christmas past, and remains a popular attraction to this day.

I went to the Festival of Trees yesterday and combed nearly every part of the museum. I saw an antique tractor that was new to me, if not to the museum. One wheel of the tractor had been engulfed by a tree. For years, as the tractor sat idle in a field, a tree grew around it. Eventually, most of the tree was removed, but part of it had so “claimed” the tractor wheel that it had become part of it. I couldn’t stop staring at this emblem of the marriage of metal and wood that is so much a part of a western boomtown. It is an apt metaphor for European settlement in this part of the world. It is also an apt metaphor for nature’s readiness to reclaim the artifacts of settlement once we are finished with them.

I wish I had a photograph of the tractor wheel to show you. But here’s a photo of a bicycle eating tree (an “ironivorous” tree) that can be found all over the Internet. In fact, I dare you to Google “bicycle eating tree” and see what happens.

We can tell our stories, old and new, but the Earth may have the final telling.