by Richard
Every year I face the same dilemma. Do we go with sparkly, shimmery fakery, or do we go with pine-smelling, needle dropping realism? That is, do we have a plastic Christmas tree, probably bought at a Walmart someday at about 3 a.m., or a real tree, bought from some roadside stand or the other, strapped on the roof of my car and prayed over the entire time, hoping madly it won’t come leaping off and plow into a car behind us?
As you can see, I’m a bit ambivalent about both methods. I mean, the only time I can really contemplate buying and using a fake tree is in the dark hours of the early morning when I’ve had far too many little glasses of Santa’s helper. I grew up with the real thing, dude. It’s hard to contemplate switching to a manufactured tree.
But then there’s the whole thing about the environment. Is it really green to purchase, and by purchasing support the whole industry, a tree planted specifically for the purpose of being basically cut down and thrown away in a couple of weeks? Should I be worried that more bits of the Earth’s lungs are being put down and then cut down with every Yule celebration?
On average, says the National Christmas Tree Association, between 25 and 30 million Christmas trees sold in the U.S. every year. There are close to 350 million Christmas trees currently growing on Christmas tree farms in the U.S. alone, all planted by farmers. Oddly enough, the National Christmas Tree Association is very bullish on the benefits of real versus plastic. I mean, they’re talking about all the toxic materials in plastic trees and, oh so slyly, letting us know that most plastic trees are made in. . . China. Horrors. Like that’s not true of most of our stuff we get for Christmas.
I know it’s a bit of propaganda, but I think I’m going to stick with the real trees. At least for a while. After all, there’s that wonderful smell. At least until the tree stops taking water and starts drying out, usually on the floor of our living room.
Which means that we’ll be celebrating the purported season of life by killing something and then displaying the corpse in our house. Sounds like a plan to me.
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