National Arbor Day is this week in the U.S. According to the Arbor Day website, Arbor Day has its seeds in the work of J. Sterling Morton. He was a Nebraska journalist and later Nebraska territory secretary who advocated for the planting of trees.
After Nebraska made the day an official holiday in the late 1800’s, the state eventually selected April 22 as the date because it was Morton’s birthday. Other states also began celebrating Arbor Day in the 1870s.
Today, National Arbor Day always falls on the last Friday of April. But some states celebrate Arbor Day on different dates depending on the planting season. Meanwhile, the holiday celebrating the planting of trees has spread around the world.
The Giving Tree
Planting trees is a nice thing to do for the earth for several reasons. And we humans benefit from trees in numerous ways too. Perhaps the best illustration of our love and destruction of trees is in Shel Silverstein‘s great children’s book, The Giving Tree.
In the 1973 animated video below, Silverstein narrates the book for viewers.
The late Shel Silverstein is also known for many other works, including books and songs recorded by Johnny Cash. Yet, he may be most famous for The Giving Tree, a book that many children grew up reading. For some reason, The Giving Tree was not a book in my childhood home so I came to it many years later as an adult.
I always find it interesting how different people react to the story. Some have very fond memories of the story and see it as a story of a loving tree who gives away everything it has. But others get angry when they think of the tale, seeing it as a story about a selfish boy taking everything from the tree.
Is it a story of love and charity? Or is it a story of selfishness and domination? What does the last line — “And the tree was happy” — signify? One may come up with several theories about the book’s meaning, but the ambiguity is why the book has become a classic. The book allows each of us to see different things, perhaps even understanding the story differently at different stages of our own lives.
No matter what you think of The Giving Tree, let’s take a moment to thank all of our tree friends this Arbor Day.
What do you think is the message of The Giving Tree? Leave your two cents in the comments.
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