Tis’ the season for Christmas trees - big, beautiful, real Christmas trees. Woe be to those who traffic in fake plastic trees. May their imitation trees and pine tree scented spray and candles melt away into the night in the fake fire of a DVD fireplace on their television.
And double woe be to those who perpetuate the pink or white fake plastic Christmas tree. May they move to Del Vista Boca, Florida (the home and place of origin of the fake plastic Christmas tree) never to return to these shores again.
My beautiful wife, Special Sauce Caldwell, and I had exactly two disagreements in the first year of our marriage (in the year of our Lord, 2001). They were whether or not you should leave the shower curtain pulled open after a shower, (she was right, those black mildew lines appear pretty quickly when the curtain is left in a folded state after a shower) and whether we should get a real tree or use the fake plastic one that had been handed down to us from her family and came in a gym bag the size of a dog sled (harnessed dog team and all).
I’m not sure who won the argument that first year, but we reached an armistice agreement whereby we would alternate yearly between fake plastic tree and real, glorious, divine, fragrant, real Christmas tree.
Her argument runs thusly: A real tree is pretty much a cleaning nightmare. There are needles everywhere for months afterwards, you have to somehow properly dispose of the tree afterwards (and not like my dad who simply threw our old tree in the back woods of our house on a pile of thirty years worth of Christmas trees) and you have to remember to water the tree. When she comments on the mess of a real tree I often think of responding with “we should see if we can get some fake kids as well, you should see the puddle of cereal milk in the playroom!”
And in the last few years she has added an environmental component to her argument, which goes “why should we support the cutting down of precious trees when they help to gobble up all that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” This is a powerful argument indeed. Trees are being cut down all over the world as we speak; to clear land for cattle grazing so that we can have our double cheeseburgers, to further suburban sprawl etc. Why should we add millions and millions of pine and fur trees to this total just for one month’s enjoyment each year?
I would be swayed by this appeal to Mother Nature if the alternative were not a plastic Christmas trees. I’m fairly sure that the production of millions and millions of tons of plastic from limited fossil fuels that support unstable and tyrannical governments in a particular part of the world does not count as a progressive argument against real Christmas trees. If there were a corn starch, alternative plastic tree out there then maybe, just maybe I would be moved by this appeal to the environment. But the last time I checked my local box store; all the fake trees were run-of-the-mill polypropylene types.
My argument for a real tree goes like this: A real tree is better! (I’m not known far and wide for my stunning logic.)
But, there is no getting by how great it is to go to a Christmas tree farm or a local tree lot and pick out that year’s tree. (Or in my family’s case, that bi-annual year’s tree.) We usually head straight to the twenty dollar rack and see what sort of sad sack tree we can take home and transform into a glorious family Christmas tree. I like to find the one that is sitting in the corner of the lot on its side and pull it to a standing position and imagine it in my cozy living room. It’s sort of my contribution to the world, the adopting of the homely pine tree. It’s a variation on the Orphan Annie theme.
And that’s another knock against the fake tree, it’s the same one every year! There is no variation, no surprise, no resurrection, and no personality. It’s all too antiseptic and perfect, like a freakish clone sitting where a tree with character should be.
This year we were scheduled to get a real tree, and as she always does, my wife made one last bi-yearly appeal to think about getting the fake tree out of the barn. I said “sweetheart, we have to honor the armistice that we signed all those years ago. If we start fudging on this one point then everything else goes “kabloowy”.
But man oh man did this year’s tree leave a mess in the old minivan. We will be finding needles till August. Also, when I went to screw in the tree into the tree stand I was treated to the wonderful site of a nest of spiders that came with the tree. It was the Temple of Doom under there. For the record, I don’t dig spiders. All this, plus it took forever to get the pitch off of my hands afterwards.
So maybe a plastic tree is not such a bad idea…
Ahh! What’s happening to me!
