A rant about Christmas Trees - of the artificial variety

So, since I haven't lived with my parents for pushing 20 years or more I didn't have a Christmas Tree until a couple years ago. The wife and I decided to buy a fake tree. They look pretty convincing now and once you get a whole bunch of lights and garland and ornaments on them, you can hardly tell it's fake. Besides that, it still seemed to drop needles and the cats still climbed up inside it and regularly broke nice glass ornaments, so all in all, it was a good experience.

We didn't put it up this year, I think mainly due to holiday overload. We're both so totally over the whole Christmas-hype-b.s. Tired of the sales, the commercials, the rampant push to fuel this greed and acquisition holiday. We just weren't in the mood, so the tree never came out of its box in the closet. My parents never seem to stop spending way more on the presents than they should, and I never seem to be able to spend enough to equal their generosity. It's not supposed to be a game of "who can spend more money being generous in the spirit of giving," but it still ends up feeling like that.

I'm always cash-strapped it seems so I give what I can within reason and still end up feeling crappy because my parents always give more. At least these days my brother and his wife are doing about as bad as we are, so at least I don't feel bad because their gift giving is fairly modest. What sparked this whole rant though was the recently acquired knowledge that our artificial tree is a much more environmentally *unfriendly* option than a traditional live Christmas tree.

http://earth911.com/news/2010/11/29/real-vs-artificial-christmas-trees/

We try to live as environmentally friendly as possible. I bike practically everywhere so that I don't have to drive the car. We recycle virtually everything we can. And we try to purchase things in minimal packaging, avoiding stuff that has to be trucked long distances, etc. In short by not examining the whole tree thing more closely, we inadvertently committed a major environmental faux pas, perhaps even a crime against nature (trying inject a little levity here folks).

In the past I'd tried to keep one of those little baby Norfolk Island Pine potted trees, you know the ones that places like the big box home improvement stores carry all through December. Their little pots are wrapped in red foil and they even appear to have been dusted with festive glitter. Some even come with tiny little red, gold, and sliver glitter covered foam ornaments. They look nice for a few weeks until the hot dry indoor air and the lack of sunlight catches up with them. Eventually they succumb to their indoor existence and end up dessicated and dead, in the trash.

My parents had a Norfolk Island Pine that had lived through the move to three different states and had grown to a height of probably five feet tall and had lived at least 20 years or more before it finally died off for some reason or other a few years back. The Christmas Tree, despite its name is actually a Pagan symbol to remind people that even in the darkest depths of winter there are still green things to be seen. There is still life amongst the death and darkness of winter.

The tree was brought in to remind them of this life in winter and as the Winter Solstice approached, to remind them that the days would be growing longer and the slow climb out of the darkness of winter was beginning. The climb towards Spring and life and planting crops. So, I sit thinking of the artificial tree in the closet. It's sitting there sort of like a hidden shame. An artificial version of a symbol of life. It can't even get that right.

Because of its environmentally irresponsible construction, we'd need to keep it and use it for probably a few more years to justify its purchase cost over the cost of live trees. Even then, there will still be issue of the wastefulness of its disposal and all the unrenewable energy that went into its construction. For right now though, the tree will stay in its box in the closet. We'll have until sometime next year to decide what to do with it, whether we'll decorate it and it'll stand there as a monument to our mistake, or maybe as a reminder to think things through and make better environmental choices the next time.

Or, maybe we'll consider it a lesson learned and the fake tree will go to the curb to be taken away to the landfill while the real trees go to be recycled into mulch or to be sunken in lakes and ponds as fish breeding sites. Maybe next year we'll bring a real tree inside, cut from a local farm or perhaps in a pot. I think a real tree is a better way to honor the spirit of the season, to celebrate that in the midst of the darkest part of the year there is still life and the promise of brighter days ahead.