Day 1: Christmas Trees
This is kind of where everything begins.
For those of you who don’t know because you’re from Africa or you grew up with sane parents who didn’t try to put on bizarre facades, a Christmas tree is a pine tree that you cut down and then bring in your house for a couple weeks, then throw in the garbage.
There are several different options for getting trees.
A lot of people get their trees from lots that spring up in the middle of Target and grocery store parking lots. You’ll recognize them if you’ve ever seen a motion picture that shows Auschwitz, because between the tall wire fence and the trees packed inside and getting thinner and weaker by the day, the presentation style definitely draws a lot from German aesthetics in the early 1940’s.
Here you can talk to the scariest man you will ever meet in your life and negotiate a completely unfair price for a tree. The more spindly and tilted, the cheaper. Sort of how it’s cheaper to adopt a very ugly child. Then you go ahead and strap it to the top of your car and ruin the entire top by driving home a scratchy, sappy object that was not meant to be transported by anything but a goddamn tornado that rips it out of the ground.
Option two is to buy a plastic tree. Somewhere there is a factory producing entirely fake trees from chemicals and hot pressing machines and what has to be prison labor. The nice part of these is that you can take them apart and shove it all in the garbage in sensible pieces. The downside is that it serves to remind you of just how artificial every part of your life is. Again.
Once you get it home, you cover it in lights and weird ornaments. The idea is to make it look as little like a tree as possible by making it electronic and covered with memories of weird aunts and grade school crafts involving pinecones and pipe cleaners that I wouldn’t do again if you held a gun to my head.
Of course, something special goes on the top. Lots of people use an angel. Because that certainly confuses the whole Christmas story, so why not? Some people use a star. I suppose this makes more sense as the wise men found their way to Jesus via star guidance, although if they were so fucking smart I would think they would have brought a map. I take along a map to find the Vienna Beef stand in Denver, so I would think if I was going to meet the son of god, I would go ahead and take a few seconds to print off Mapquest. Idiots.
The tree then spends the next couple weeks before Christmas dominating your living room. If you went live, you’re vacuuming up pine needles and trying to figure out why the goddamn cat won’t leave it alone. And how much do you water it? You don’t know because you don’t generally try to keep a tree without roots alive in your home. If you bought fake, you have an arm that falls off every day or so that you end up taping to the big pole in the center, and your days are filled with sudden “Oh, fuck,” moments when you’re at work, trying to remember if you unplugged the tree and imagining your house in flames.
Which would serve you right.
This whole tree thing is fucking insane. You cut down something that’s supposed to live a hundred years so that you can have it in your living room for two weeks and then throw it in the trash, still covered in tinsel. People complain that we’re killing animals for food, but holy shit, they still live 20% of their lifespan instead of .01%.
And what do you need a tree inside for anyway? The whole reason to build a house is to put a barrier between you and shit like bushes, sand, and trees. Why not just bring in a fucking tumbleweed during the summer, decorate it with old eggshells or something?
Let’s stop it with the trees already.