By Christopher Ketcham

and the New Year has turned, I get the urge to burn Christmas trees. The trees are of course everywhere on curbs, used for the season and dumped. The urge is atavistic, a return to younger days, when kids in South Brooklyn made Christ­mas tree burnings an annual affair. Usually, it was a one-act tree: We’d drag it into the street, light it and flee, watching with frantic backward glances the flicking flames, the cinders spilling, the ash crumbling, and then the tree’s green girth reduced to the blackened stripped trunk at its center sweating sap. How pitiful the tree then looked, and you felt almost bad about burning it.
One January a decade ago, a bunch of the boys, the old boys from Carroll Gardens, got together in the wide empty schoolyard of Public School 29 between Kane and Baltic Streets to build the biggest Christmas tree bonfire South Brooklyn would ever see, a six-story fire that is still lamented and mythologized, and whose culprits are still sought.
There were about 12 of them, guys of Irish, Italian or German descent who’d grown up in South Brooklyn and hung out in the PS 29 schoolyard playing basketball and baseball, drinking beer and smoking pot and tearing the knees of their pants screwing girls on the concrete. They were in their very early 20s, or in their teens, 14 and 15 years old, and had been in varying states of minor trouble their whole lives. They weren’t mean kids, didn’t carry guns or knives. They jumped turnstiles or shoplifted or dropped out of school. Few of them, I think, actually saw the inside of PS 29, and a few had been to jail in stints. One was an amateur thief whom we called the Bathtub Burglar because he was caught taking a bubble bath in an apartment he had broken into.
You can imagine how the mischief started. Six or seven guys passing a joint in the cold in an unlit corner of the yard, stomping their feet, waiting for something to happen.
“Yo, it’s cold,” one says.
“Need a fire,” says another.
“A fire’d be nice,” says a third.
After a minute, a fourth speaks up: “What the fuck, let’s build a fire!”
“Yeah, ya gonna make it with what?”
Long silence.
“We could do Christmas trees.”
“Yeah, Christmas trees.”
“Nah, we could start a bonfire. Like ten Christmas trees. Then we’ll be warm.”
“In jail.”
“Lotsa Christmas trees.”
“You fuckin’ start it.”
“Yeah? Fuck. How many Christmas trees you want?”
“I told you, fuckin’ ten. Fuckin’ twenty. Fuckin’as many as ya fuck ya mother with.”
It goes quickly haywire from there, much yelling, everyone cold. A guy named Flash shows up random and bug-eyed, just off work in his sputtering ’68 Volkswagen stationwagon, which he called the Nazimobile. The Nazimobile was getting old and had trouble starting, especially in cold winters. Some­times I’d have to jump out and push-start her, slipping and falling on the ice with Flash cursing at his clutch. But the Nazimobile had a long bed in its rear, ideal for hauling Christmas trees.
A couple more guys appear out of the night, hoping for action, and after a while there’s a plan.
First, drugs. Someone produces a bundle of LSD tabs, and the group gladly gobbles them down. Someone else offers a bottle of amyl-nitrate. All sniff the bottle, getting dizzy and amnesiac and some falling down and getting up and ignoring their hurt arms. Soon they’re hurtling through the neighborhood hunting trees. They love the work, shouting to the schoolyard and dragging the firs, piling them in the back of the Nazimobile. They pick up three or four on Union Street, where the longshoremen 20 years ago used to drink and now the homes are over-priced. They move nearby to Strong Place, where there are plenty of fat and expensive trees. The dragnet widens to Hicks, Henry, Clinton, Sackett, past Union, past the streets they know.
They go off in teams of two, teams of four, and they are remarkably organized: Some fetch the trees, some line them to the site where they are stacked, some do the stacking. The pile grows to 10 feet, 20 feet, perched against the brick wall of the back of the school, the trees spilling off. The boys’ jackets are covered in pine needles, and their hands are gluey with sap. The acid washes over them—they are smiling enormously—and passersby wonder what in hell is going on. It’s time to light the bonfire. The boys climb on each other’s shoulders, tilting and weaving like a clown act. They want it to burn fast, so they light the pile both high up and low down.
The pile practically explodes.
A dry Christmas tree burns as if soaked in gasoline. It crackles like mortar breaking. A 60-tree-pile makes a much more dramatic sound, something like a mile of bubblewrap stomped by Paul Bunyan. The smell is indescribably good: a wet, sweet odor similar to burnt leaves that permeates clothing and runs into the nose and mouth and stays there. My friends later told me the wind carried it north across Brooklyn Heights and east to Park Slope and south across Carroll Gardens and Red Hook, and I imagined it carried to the bay and beyond to the shipping-lane waves that crashed against big ships bound for New Jersey.
When the fire rose high, it got bright like the sun. The boys shaded their eyes and were forced away, to the middle of the schoolyard. The black rubber power lines to the school were melting. You could see them sparkle and pop. The flames were making an ooooom sound, scorching the red brick and blowing out the windows and billowing black smoke. Soon it was so hot the boys had to flee—they went two blocks away and you could see the flames rising over the roofs of Brooklyn.
A half dozen firetrucks finally put out the celebration, and rumors as to who started it crossed the neighborhood for weeks. The cops swore they’d find the bastards who lit the match, but they never did. It was thought to be an attempt by kids to burn down the school, but this was quickly discounted because such an arson would have required a measure of thought. “Charlie eventually got blamed for lighting the fire,” says my old friend Flash, who long ago had to junk the Nazimobile. “Everybody said it was Charlie, but everybody knew it wasn’t. I mean, he wasn’t even there that night. Charlie was always getting beat-up. He was always the scapegoat.”
Charlie died not long after the incident. His body was discovered on a bench in a playground near the BQE at Atlantic Avenue. He was laying by the kiddie swings, and he had heroin in his veins. About a block from where Charlie died I once found a man dead with a smashed half of a watermelon on his head. So I think of these two ghosts when I walk down Atlantic Avenue to the ocean, and every Christmas I think of the PS 29 bonfire and the culprits still at large and how some of them, too, have died in the interim.
For millenia in the Western world, fire has been lit at mid-winter, usually to celebrate or beckon the return of the sun at the solstice. Fire, of course, is the quintessential solar-symbol, a symbol of life and health, libido and fecundity. Like water, it is a symbol of transformation and regeneration. The heathen of ancient Europe kindled the Yule log to help rekindle the sun, to assure a supply of light and heat and crops for the coming year, and until about ten years ago some local TV stations aired a burning Yule log on Christmas Eve that burned without cease until the dawn of the big day.
Fire festivals remain with us, fireworks displays being the most obvious. But the trimming of a Christmas tree with colored lights is also a fire festival, albeit in domesticated form. Setting a Christmas tree aflame is the ultimate trimming. Although that’s probably not what the little pyromaniacs at the PS 29 schoolyard had in mind.