In the Beginning...

“Families have been coming to our house for over twenty-five years. That’s when the Wishing Tree began. The tree is nothing special as far as trees go, other than the fact that it is one of the few spots of green in the dry, desert town of Tucson, Arizona. It is a tall Aleppo Pine, measuring about sixty feet in height, but there are several trees just like it in our neighborhood. Unlike all the other trees, this one gets visitors - lots of them. And, they all have a story to tell.

The Wishing Tree first began with the new millennium, in the year 2000. It started, simply enough, as a child’s science fair project. Our daughter, Elizabeth, heard on the news that society was becoming materialistic and self-centered. As a somewhat sheltered and highly sensitive twelve-year-old, she stated she did not believe the reports to be true. She thought people were inherently good and wanted the best for others. After we brainstormed, she decided to test her theory by seeing what people wished for, and in particular, when they thought no one was watching.

Since our family lives in a neighborhood called “Winterhaven,” which hosts a winter festival of lights for two weeks every December, there is a great deal of foot traffic that passes by our home. Elizabeth hoped that the foot traffic would provide enough human subjects for a statistically significant sample size, or at least large enough for a seventh-grade science project. After placing a stapler, a few pens, and one hundred small pieces of paper in a plastic bin on a table in front of the tree that stands by the side of the road, Elizabeth wrote a simple, handwritten sign stating, “Make a Wish.” Nothing more in the way of instructions or explanations, just that. She stapled her wish to the tree as an example of what to do. My husband and I added ours and helped our three-year-old, Meagan, write hers as well. And then we all went inside to wait.

By the night's end, people strolling by to look at the lights in the neighborhood had figured out what to do, and all of the papers were gone. One hundred wishes were on the tree. My daughter realized she might need to cut a lot more wishes for the future nights of the festival. For the next fourteen days, she did nothing more than replace the supplies as they ran out each night. By the end of the two weeks, she had 2,775 wishes on the tree - and a lot of work ahead of her in analyzing those wishes. She evaluated whether each wish was materialistic or not, whether the wishes were for the person writing it or others in their family or world, and she kept track of the buying trends.

The good news? She was right. The majority of the wishes were non-materialistic. And most of the wishes were for someone else, other than themself. A simple project, conducted by a young girl, became a beautiful tribute to humanity. And it is a local legend and family tradition that has continued for twenty-five years.

The popularity of the tree has increased exponentially since the first year. Just last year, the tree gathered 32,628 wishes during the two-week period, and the total over the decades is fast approaching 400,000 wishes. The Wishing Tree has taken on a life of its own. And that life has become our life. It is our privilege to witness the outpouring of people’s innermost thoughts, dreams, and secrets. The wishes we read on the tree continued to be overwhelmingly positive, non-materialistic, and for others, not themselves. They show how our world could be if we all revealed our dreams. The stories are a testament to humanity’s capacity for hope. And those stories are what keep us, and the tree, going.”

Kathleen A. Bethel, Homeowner