The color of 2024: every shade of refusing green
Or: let’s talk about pine trees.
There once was a nymph who lived in the mountains. She was, like all of her sisters, pretty and long-limbed. Her hair was yellow, touched with red, and her eyes were the darkest green, mixed with brown, and (not that it mattered) she was funny, too. A bright thing, though sometimes oversharp and a little unkind. Her name was Pitys, and she was loved.
Her sisters loved her, of course, but unfortunately so did two gods. One was Pan, that limber trickster, who wooed her with his reed-pipes and his nonsense songs. The other was a cold, harsh fellow—Boreus, god of northeasterly winds and violent storms. While Pan danced drunkenly and cavorted happily, Boreus tried to win Pitys with a show of pure strength. He blew down all the trees on Pitys mountaintop. Limbs crashed to the ground, splinters flew through the air, roots undone, naked to the sun. Pitys was unmoved; she had already set her sights on Pan. (He’d be a more fun lay, she knew, thanks to the whispers of her sisters). But instead of waiting for Pitys to tell Boreus of her decision, Pan laughed at the old man and his bluster. “It would never have been you,” he told Boreus. In a rage, Boreus whirled on Pitys. He grabbed her by the waist and hurled her from the mountain. Her body crashed down, broken and lifeless.
Where it fell, a pine tree grew.
There are other versions of the myth. In some, Pitys suffers the same fate as Daphne, for the same reasons. Pan pursued her, she didn’t want to fuck, and so dug her feet into the soil and stretched her arms to the sky. I prefer the version with Boreus, but no matter which story you pick, the central theme remains the same. Where there once was a woman, now there’s a tree.
For whatever reason, I’ve always thought of pine trees as masculine figures, though I can’t quite put my finger on why. Maybe it’s because I’m most familiar with the white pines of New England, which have a rigidity that I associate with men. Maybe if I’d grown up somewhere else, I’d have a different impression of pines—there are, after all, so dang many of them.
I chose to write about pine, and pine green, because it’s everywhere right now. It’s piled high outside grocery stores in the form of wreaths and boughs. It’s inside houses, immature little pines covered in baubles, held upright in stands. But even more prevalent is pine’s distinctive texture and color. Plastic conifers deck the halls; trees wear pine green skirts; ugly sweaters in deep green haunt the hallways of my daughter’s elementary school; cardboard pines sit upright on restaurant tables. Paired with vermillion, pine green is the hue most emblematic of December. I’d argue it’s the more important color of the two, the one with stronger historical precedence. Santa wears red because a Harper’s Weekly illustrator dressed him that way (before the 1880s, Santa wore head-to-toe fur). Evergreen is for the solstice because of what it symbolizes: toughness, persistence, resistance.
Any region that experiences deep, hibernatory winter also has traditions to go with it, and many of those center around the elements of life that we miss most poignantly: light, color, song, warmth. Winter is a time of death; amidst all that loss, evergreens are a sign of life. Green is always a sign of life; but it doesn’t have to be pine green. Holly green is another traditional color (and yes, they do have red berries, so that could be the reason we associate that pairing so strongly with Christmas). There’s also the green of shrubs, like rhododendron leaves and boxwoods, and creeping vines, like ivy and wintergreen. I used to despise winter and its Boreus harshness, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to respect it a lot more. I’ve figured out how to find color in the drab days, and looking for evergreens is an important part of that process. It’s learning to love those deep greens; learning to see them through the dirt and snow.
This year, green has been everywhere. Specifically, lime green, aka “brat green.” But greens, more generally, rose in public esteem, according to Madé Lapuerta at @databutmakeitfashion. “i pulled thousands of online posts referencing green fashion this year and analyzed a combination of sentiment and engagement metrics to compare avg popularity over time,” explained the blogger. “from olive green to neon green to emerald green….green dominated fashion this year.” In the comments on Instagram, people echoed the sentiment, adding their own analysis to why green might have been so huge. “Also the rise of matcha obsession in Europe!!!” “I wonder how much the release of wicked played into its popularity” etc.
While I didn’t see anyone cite The Substance, I think it’s worth mentioning that the “activator” potion in that movie is a toxic, acid green liquid. The director could have made the titular substance a medicinal brown or a nauseating pill yellow, but instead she chose to go the neon route. It’s no less disturbing than those options, but a whole lot more playful.
While I haven’t totally worked this idea out yet, I do think there’s something interesting about how these various trendy greens are all a little rude-coded. The craving for green wasn’t born out of some collective desire to “take a deep breath, oxygenate and reinvigorate” (this is how Pantone marketed Greenery, their 2017 color of the year). Neither the loud, limey green of Charlie XCX’s album cover nor the piney green skin of Elphaba in Wicked are being read as relaxing. They aren’t leafy or soothing, but brash and confronting. Both greens are, in this way, rather vintage. Envious greens, witchy greens, bitchy greens. Maybe even bitter greens.
Initially, I didn’t think of pine as one of those greens. Except once upon a time, all shades of green were considered suspicious. One of my favorite chapters in any Michel Pastoureau color book is about the devilish greens of Europe. Green was the color reserved for witches, ghosts, liars, cheats, the covetous, and the cruel.
Brat green, olive green, even Pantone’s greenery—these are warm greens, dosed with a good amount of butter and brown. Since there are over 100 species of pine, it’s hard to say what, precisely, constitutes pine green. Many retailers seem to consider it a teal-ish color, almost mallard, almost Atlantic. Personally, I think of pine green as being a deep, neutral green, having an excess of neither blue nor yellow, owing a good deal of its poignancy to the presence of black. That makes it far sleepier than brat, and rather sweeter than olive, yet it’s still wilder than teal. Rangier. A camouflage green. A green for long nights and winters.
As 2024 comes to a close, I find myself thinking an awful lot about pines—the tree, the color, the scent, the flavor. I used to pick pine tips during the earliest days of spring. I like to chew on their bright, citrusy nubs, straight off the bough. You can use them in the kitchen, too; they turn ordinary honey into something godly, a cup of tea into a burst of winter flavor, a glass of vodka into the greenest, sharpest martini you’ve ever tasted. While one couldn’t live on pine tips alone, they’re a decent addition to any would-be survivalist’s arsenal. Or at least, they’re a nice way to remind ourselves that the world is brutal but it’s also nourishing. That whatever is coming, we do have the tools to refuse, to resist, to survive.
Evergreen.
I've never denied my bias: I love being a Washingtonian and hailing from the Evergreen State. As much as you can miss a license plate, I do. Those of my youth sported iridescent piney greens (https://dannyslicenseplates.com/washingtonhistory/). When the state updated to some gawd-awful red-white-and-blue centennial BS, I remember being *offended*. We're the Evergreen State-- where's the freaking green!?
I'm not a pub trivia guy who can tell you state birds and gems, but I know that our state flower is the Rhododendron, which you can see pretty much everywhere. But the best place? Glad everybody asked. When I was younger, I performed in Kismet as part of the Mountaineers, and this ragtag group performs in a forest amphitheatre surrounded by a Rhododendron preserve. I know we use the term "magical" a lot, but it is a magical place: https://www.foresttheater.com/about-us/our-story.
I love your pieces - I very much look forward to reading them