November 26, 1981

''I couldn't let that punk get away with it and what counts is that he didn't.

It's still November, but Pat Septon is already running short on Christmas spirit. For weeks now, he and hundreds of other eastern Canadians have been spending 12- and 14-hour days chopping down Christmas trees to decorate the living rooms, dens and basements of millions of American homes in the coming weeks. This is the busiest time of year for Canada's Christmas tree exporters, an informally organized but highly competitive multimillion-dollar industry that is currently going through some major changes. All over Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec, the brattling sound of chain saws has echoed through the woods since the last 10 days of October. The 10- to 12-year-old trees, mostly balsam, have been selected, felled, dragged to nearby dirt roads and hauled to packing yards.

Mayor Koch has abandoned the policy of letting New York City agency heads pick their own deputies and has ordered that all such appointments be made by City Hall. In a memorandum to all agency heads, the Mayor said that ''these consultations are not to be considered pro forma.'' Moreover, he wrote, City Hall will not be bound by any commitments that agency heads may make to potential appointees. He attributed the need for the new policy to a shift in emphasis, from the ''fiscal stability'' that he says he concentrated on in his first term to the ''enhanced delivery of services'' that he has promised in his second.

Let there be light, said the skyscraper owners, and there was light, and it was good.

Leonid I. Brezhnev and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt today ended three days of talks during which they agreed to set up separate Soviet-West German contacts on arms control parallel to the Soviet-American talks starting Monday in Geneva. A West German spokesman, Kurt Becker, disclosed the plan at a news conference, saying that the separate exchanges were considered necessary because ''we are the people most deeply concerned'' by the outcome of the Soviet-American talks, which will seek to limit or reduce medium-range nuclear weapons in Europe. The State Department, commenting in Washington on various arms proposals made by Mr. Brezhnev in Bonn, said that with the Geneva talks about to begin, it was now ''time for serious discussions and a cessation of public posturing.'' (Page A10.)