A true story. 

There once was a spider who climbed into a lush, seven-foot fir tree somewhere in Oregon. This happened sometime in September or October. She wove a small, silken pad deep among the needles and laid hundreds of eggs upon it. Then she spun layer after layer of silk over them, sealing them in a warm, white chamber. Her life’s work. 

Having fulfilled the measure of her creation, she went where all spiders go. But where is that? Are spiders elegant biological machines, or are they living souls? I don’t know. Perhaps at some future date we’ll be blessed to understand such things. 

What we do know is this: as autumn cooled, the temperature dropped below fifty degrees, and her eggs slipped into dormancy. October passed into November. And sometime in the last days of November or early December, humans with chainsaws arrived for the final harvest. 

The tree was cut, loaded onto a truck, bundled into a refrigerated trailer, and shipped hundreds of miles away to a Smith’s Marketplace in Logan, Utah. There is stood with a number of other trees in the area just outside the front doors in the snow and cold and fluorescent lights. How many days and nights it waited there, we don’t know. But one evening, a mother and father and their four girls arrived to find their Christmas tree. 

They walked among the evergreens, feeling for soft needles, breathing in the deep, resinous smells. They found the tree. It was perfect. They paid for it, tied it to the top of their minivan, and drove home over the mountains to the south end of the lake. Then they set it up, the father complaining, as he always did, about the goofy screw-stabilizers, strung the lights, and hung ornaments from past Christmases. The little tree filled the room with warmth, scent, and memory. 

On Christmas morning they came down to open presents. As the sun rose, the light through the front window illuminated the tree. And something was different. 

The branches shimmered. 

The girls peered closer to investigate.  

And found thin silk filaments. Everywhere. And then, to their shock, they saw that the whole tree was alive, moving with hundreds of baby spiders. A small horde that had warmed over the days and hatched silently sometime in the deep night after Santa and Mrs. Claus had gone to bed. A small horde that had then gotten to work—tiny, mad elves weaving their own gossamer garlands through the branches. 

When the girls realized what they were seeing, there were shrieks of horror. Then the father, not knowing what else to do, escorted the tree, its decorations, and mad elves outside into the cold. The father returned, closed the door, and the whole family stood there, looking at the tree out on the deck, a bit stunned.  

All these years later, it’s one of our family’s warm and funny memories. But if you ponder it just a little longer, it’s also one that lingers. 

Are spiders merely elegant machines? Or are they living souls? Do they have claim upon us? Should a swarm of locusts or an infestation of roaches be preserved? 

I will leave such questions to you, Dear Reader. 

In the meantime, I wish you the merriest of Christmases. Whatever you believe or don’t, may you receive a measure of divine light this season—and reflect it, to brighten the world, if even just a little, for creatures both great and small. 

John