The Christmas tree ritual

Though it's always a relief to reclaim our living room after removing all the decorations from the Christmas tree and hauling it out of the house, I never fail to feel melancholy after dropping it in the pile of dead trees at the township office. Seeing this mass dumping ground of once gloriously lit and bejeweled trees signals the passing of the holiday season with a blunt finality.

It also makes me ponder this strange ritual of the Christmas tree.

Before I launch into this unintentionally Scrooge-like essay, allow me to make it clear that I do like having a Christmas tree, and much of what I write here is tongue-in-cheek.

That said, Think about it: we have massive tree farms that grow coniferous trees for the sole purpose of selling them for Christmas. We holiday consumers buy these trees for, say, $50 to $100 (and possibly more) for maybe a month of use. These trees are chopped down and plunked in glorified buckets of water in our homes. The primitive life support buckets stave off the trees' inevitable deaths while we cover them top to bottom in shiny trinkets and electric lights. They're slowly dying, but they looked damned good while they're doing it.

Speaking of tree decorations: who first said, "you know what would be a great idea? Why not cover these trees with incredibly delicate decorations! And let's make most of them out of glass! And the thinner the glass, the better! What could possibly go wrong?! Oh, you say you have cats?! Don't worry! No problem! Those cats won't care about those shiny, easily breakable objects dangling from this climbable pine tree in your living room!"

So after the tree has given its life by fulfilling its purpose, we remove and store whatever delicate decorations have survived either gravity or curious felines. We wrestle with the tree, removing it from its now useless life-support bucket, while this poor dead husk of an evergreen deposits hundreds of tiny green needles with every slight jostle. Finally, the tree corpse is taken to our local tree morgue. 

And we gladly and joyously do it all over again the next year.