Page 9 of The Forever Christmas Tree

“I’ve already ordered the work to begin Monday morning. We’re short at least fourteen thousand. We can borrow that amount, but we’ll have to find a way to repay quickly, or else—”

Ethan could give them that amount, easily, or lend it to them. But he knew they wouldn’t accept. Small-town pride and all that.

“You can’t raise taxes. We’re already sky high. No way!” said Sally Dawson, speaking up for the first time. Sally ran the bakery/ice cream parlor and struggled as a single parent to raise three sons since her husband died in Afghanistan.

“I’d have to double the price of my trees,” Ethan mused aloud, though he wasn’t really complaining about taxes.

Baxter didn’t take it that way, though. “Your trees cost too much already.”

“You should talk! You’d think your shovels were gold-plated,” Ethan countered.

“Customers are already complaining about the price of my Crab Imperial,” Tony inserted to the grumble fest.

The complaints came fast and furious then.

“What will Mr. Conti think about keeping the factory going if the town looks so downtrodden we can’t even afford proper street lamps?”

“This stinks.”

“What next? Street excavation for new water lines?”

“And if it snows?”

“It hardly ever snows.”

“It does sometimes. Remember that blizzard back when we were kids?”

“If we’re going to spend money on streetlights, I want something done about the sand dunes piling up on my side of town. You can’t hardly see the ocean for the dunes anymore.”

“Forget lights and sand dunes, I want the sidewalks repaired.”

Doreen pounded the table with her gavel, which was actually a small lady’s hammer, probably a gift from Baxter. “Enough! And before I forget, Ethan, isn’t it about time you let us have that blue spruce for the town square gazebo this year? It’s already too big for an indoor tree.”

“You’ve kept it trimmed to a perfect shape,” Sally complimented him.

“It is beautiful, at least twenty feet now, I’m guessing,” Abe remarked.

It was actually eighteen and one quarter, a star in the midst of a litter of runts on the local Rutledge Tree Farm. The blue spruce had been a pet project of Ethan’s which he’d nursed meticulously for many years, succeeding where his father and grandfather had failed: to grow a perfect Outer Banks Christmas tree, especially a type so out of place for barrier island development, even more so than other species. It had only cost about five thousand dollars so far in fertilizer, wind and sun screens, and time, making it commercially unacceptable. But that was beside the point.

“Think about how impressed Mr. Conti would be,” Laura said, knowing exactly why he would never cut down that particular tree.

Really, they’d gone too far this time. He had refused to cut that tree down every single year when they’d started asking, once it became apparent that this was the one Christmas tree that had managed to flourish here on the island. He didn’t mind donating a tree, even one of the pricey ones from over on the mountain, but not that one. All he said was “No!” but he said it with such finality that no one argued, just indulged in a lot of under-the-breath griping.

The Catholic church bells began to toll, nine times. Followed by the Presbyterian church. Followed by the town hall clock. Ethan put his face in his hands and counted to ten, then twenty.

“I have never seen such a bunch of grinches in all my life!” Doreen said then. “I swear, Dr. Seuss must have modeled his book on you yahoos. What we need is some ideas here, not complaints.”

“Ooh, ooh, ooh! I have an idea for a fund-raiser,” Laura said.

Ethan raised his head to stare at her. He didn’t like the tone of her voice, way too gleeful. And she was looking at him.

“A Grinch contest. Around the town, we could place posters with nominees for the grinchiest person in town. People would vote five dollars a shot for their choice, or they could add a nominee. The money could be collected in Mason jars. You would donate those, right, Bax?”

Baxter was too stunned to answer.

“Isn’t that kind of mean?” Sally asked.

“Nah! It could be fun. All in the spirit of Christmas giving,” Laura contended. “We’ll probably be able to pay for the Christmas streetlight project in no time, and have money left over. I’ll put a running total in the window of The Bell every night. Maybe we could even have a crowning of Mr. Grinch at the concert on Christmas Eve. Or Ms. Grinch. Oh, there are so many possibilities. Bell Cove Grinch of the Year. I love it!”