Karen Wils photo Dad cuts an old-time Christmas tree.

ESCANABA — The ghosts of Christmas trees past waft in with the cold fog off of Little Bay de Noc.

Christmas trees from long, nearly-forgotten years sparkle in the waves or glint on the newly formed ice.

Did you ever stop to wonder about how many conifer trees lie at the bottom of Lake Michigan? Like skeletons, bare of their green needles, they rest in watery silence.

1972’s Christmas tree rocks and rolls in faded denim blue. The Christmas tree from 1959 lies in twenty-feet of water still tangled with tinsel. The 1920s tree is entombed in water but is permanently perfumed with wood smoke and candle wax.

For many generations people of the northwoods have recycled their Christmas trees by bringing them out onto the ice. Perhaps you recall your grandfather sliding the tree through the snow and depositing it out on the lake near his ice fishing shack.

For years ice fishermen have used the balsams and spruces to mark the holes on the ice where they have been spearing fish or where they have moved their ice shacks.

Groupings of former Christmas trees have even been sunk into the water to make cover for fish habitat.

Hundreds of Upper Peninsula pines and firs went to the bottom of the lake when the famous “Christmas tree ship,” the Rouse Simmons, sank in 1912.

This wooden schooner was the delight of many children when it sailed into Chicago loaded with freshly cut Christmas trees from Upper Michigan to be sold to city families.

In November of 1912, this ship was returning from Thompson, near Manistique, with evergreen trees lashed and tied all over her. Then a storm hit. Captain Schuenemann and his crew and thousands of trees were lost in the storm.

For years fishermen in the area reported pulling up conifer trees in their nets. Some folks even have claimed to see the ghost of the Christmas tree ship sailing in the late season fog.

In 1972 divers discovered the wreck of the Rouse Simmons in Lake Michigan. Several artifacts from the ship including one of its Christmas trees are on display at the Rogers Street Fishing Village Museum in Two Rivers Wisconsin.

Many a Christmas tree from our area has ended up out on the frozen Bay. Some years the ice fishing shanties and the neat, cut green trees frozen into the icy white landscape, look like little Lego villages out there.

I wonder how many of us have bits of Christmases past lapping in the waters of the Bays de Noc?

The fresh cut Christmas tree is a very recyclable thing. Chipped up into mulch, used for a bird feeder or just brought back to the forest to shelter wildlife and decompose into the earth, a Christmas tree never goes to waste.

How lucky we are to live in the beautiful northwoods where Christmas trees surround us and ghosts of Christmas trees enrich our days.

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Karen (Rose) Wils is a lifelong north Escanaba resident. Her folksy columns appear weekly in Lifestyles.