‘Tis The Season… To Argue Over Christmas Trees
Real tree or fake? White tree or green? Monochromatic lights or multi-colored? Theme or hodgepodge? For a cheerful season, it sure is fraught with disagreements, starting with, “When does the tree go up?” Of course, big box stores really really hope you’ll buy a fake one, and they can sell it to you.
Commercialism keeps pushing the season back; some years it starts before Halloween in the stores. Trick-or-treaters sometimes get a glimpse of a Christmas tree in a house while receiving candy. My daughter wished someone a Merry Christmas instead of thanking them for the candy she received. Maybe it’s not a bad idea to get the debate out of the way long before the actual season so that any bad feelings have plenty of time to dissipate.
A newer, greener option is now available to throw a monkey wrench into the real or fake tree debate. Live real trees are now gaining in popularity. (The “in” crowd refer to these trees as rooted or rootless.) You can buy a real tree, with the roots intact, that you can plant in your back yard when the holidays are over. Now, to be fair, a lot of people “plant” their real tree in their back yards when Christmas is over too, but they’re usually not very careful with it. It often goes on its side… and doesn’t usually grow. Sometimes that tree winds up as a campfire in the spring, making it multi-purpose.
These “green” evergreen trees often come from exotic locales. That blue spruce tree likely came from the top of the Rockies. If you live in Colorado, that tree might do great when you transplant it in the spring, after sweltering it half to death in your house for several months, waiting for the ground to thaw enough to dig a deep hole. If you live in Kentucky, for example, your tree, despite your best intentions, might wind up more like the typical real, rootless tree planted on its side in the back yard, even if you tried to put it root side down.
Christmas trees, as they are known today, originated in Germany in the 1600s. Apparently, the evergreen nature of the trees inspired people to believe they were magical and wondrous. Protestant reformer Martin Luther is credited with adding the Christmas lights. Supposedly, he was inspired by a starry night sky.
Comedian Jim Gaffigan thinks the credit should belong to an inebriated person.
“Alright, chop down that tree and bring it in here, and take all these lights and put them out there…”
He rationalizes that only a drunk person would want to chop down a tree, bring it into the house, take all of their lights out into the yard, and hang up some leaves on the ceiling in hopes of getting some action. Fake, real, live, dead… whatever decision you make, spike the egg nog and hang out under the mistletoe. Make sure you let us know if that Christmas tree helped you out at all.
