Reporting from New York — Icy gusts streaked up the Brooklyn street, where at 2 a.m. the only sound was the "knock knock" of Toby Bishop pounding Christmas trees into plastic bases. A group of young revelers headed toward the tree stand, a pine-scented maze along an urban sidewalk with white Christmas lights dancing in the wind. Toby watched as they approached a towering fir.
Fir crazy: Selling Christmas trees is a 24-hour job in New York
Who buys trees in the wee hours? Celebrities, urban night owls – and drunks.
Patti Romp of Vermont sells Christmas trees 24 hours a day on Montague Street… (Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles…)
A late-night sale in the making?
No, just another group of drunks out for the night. They circled the giant tree, joined their hands to give it a big hug, and then moved on, leaving Toby to shake his head in wonder.
Such is life on the 24-hour Christmas tree circuit in New York, whose nocturnal character and paralyzing daytime traffic — as well as the urban dilemma of having nowhere to stash piles of trees after closing — make all-night tree sellers a seasonal necessity, as ubiquitous as the oddballs who turn to them at all hours for the perfect fir.
So who buys a tree in the middle of the night?
"Um, drunks," said Tim Romp, 14, who each year since birth has left home in Salisbury, Vt., with his parents, Patti and Billy Romp, to live out of a small camper between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve and sell trees in New York.
Things have changed over the years. Patti and Billy split up last year, so now Tim works with his mother in Brooklyn while Billy manages his own stand at the old family spot in Manhattan. Toby, 17 — related through marriage to the Romp clan — joined Patti and Tim this year on the bustling avenue lined with small shops, a few chain stores and elegant apartment buildings.
But some things never change — sudden snowstorms, celebrity customers, bizarre requests — making life for all-night sellers predictably unpredictable. Not even the recession has had a major effect on business, said Patti, her 4-foot-10 frame buried in heavy boots, a lumberjack shirt, bulky coat and a furry hat with ear flaps. Her small radio played Christmas music as Tim, wearing a white cowboy hat, pulled an 8-foot-tall Fraser fir through the red tree-bagger, then balanced it on his shoulder and staggered down the street to deliver it.
The Romps began selling trees in 1988, when they piled the family, including the dog, into a camper and set up shop on a corner in Greenwich Village. The couple home-schooled their children, and when they were babies, Patti would strap them to her back as she worked the tree stand, marveling at the tall, elaborately dressed women with heavy makeup and hairy legs walking past. She soon realized they were transvestites, part of the neighborhood's landscape and a reminder that she was no longer in rural Vermont.
There were other reminders, like the man who walked up the sidewalk about 3 a.m., snatched a tree from the stand and sprinted down the street, as quick on his feet as a team of tiny reindeer. Clutching his piney plunder, he scrambled into a black SUV and roared off. Or the customer who teetered out of a tavern three nights in a row, stopped at the Christmas tree stand each night and bought a tree, too foggy-minded to remember he already had one or two at home.
"A different tree each night!" Tim said, still shaking his head at the idea.
One frigid night, a taxi unloaded an elegantly dressed woman onto the slushy, icy sidewalk as Patti sat outside. The woman wore open-toed stilettos.
"I said to her, 'How can you survive in shoes like that in this kind of weather?' " Patti recalled, to which the woman replied something akin to, "I survive because of shoes like this." She realized later the customer was Sarah Jessica Parker, famous for her high-heeled character in the TV show "Sex and the City." She and her husband, actor Matthew Broderick, bought a tree and carted it home.
Patti, 54, who runs a bed-and-breakfast back home, doesn't own a television and rarely recognizes famous customers. Her entertainment comes from watching the waves of a city where at any hour you can find a delivery truck unloading goods, a couple strolling down a deserted avenue or a fitness freak running off the night's indulgence.
"It seems surreal, to see the city empty just for an hour or two, and then to be out and see it waking up," said Patti, who has come to know the regular joggers, dog-walkers and shopkeepers who rise before the sun. She carries treats in her pocket for passing dogs. Shopkeepers in Brooklyn, as in Manhattan, open their bathrooms to the family. Neighbors offer hot showers in their homes.
It doesn't take a license to set up a tree stand on a city sidewalk, just permission from the adjacent building's occupants. Fresh trees — some newly delivered from distant suppliers and still bound, others with their branches fully open — line the pavement. Patti also offers wreaths and candleholders carved from tree trunks. In the loading zone on the street, somehow immune from parking tickets, her small pickup with a camper shell offers a place to take turns sleeping, warm up or make a quiet phone call.
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