Oh, Christmas Tree!

I moved out this year with my girlfriend, Ashley, and her friend and this will be our first Christmas in our first appartment. Being our first Christmas, I was faced with the task of, to be technical, “getting the apartment all Christmasy.” But when the subject of getting a Christmas tree came up, like most things, I couldn’t just take it for granted.

OK, I get it – it’s tradition. It’s tradition to cut down a 10 year old pine tree, rig it up in your living room, decorate it and throw it out after a few weeks. Throw it out right when our bellies are full to the brim with food and our souls saturated with superfluous consumption. Just like all the other things we wrapped under the tree, we use it for a bit until our satisfaction runs dry like the needles of the pine and then we chuck it outside the door for the dump-truck to bring it wherever it goes (no one seems to care). I get it, but that’s not good enough.

Especially after witnessing the horrific plastic personalities surface in shopping malls during Black Friday, I think it’s about time we re-visit what exactly the holiday season is versus what it’s become. And since no one seems to know why we cut down adolescent trees and bring them inside to die, I figured I’d consider another option or two rather than taking the status quo for granted.

Option 2 was just as bad. If you ask me, it’s ugly and tacky. I detest plastic plants, Christmas trees included. I’m sorry, but it’s not the same and far from a suitable replacement. It just reminds me how far away from nature we’ve gotten, to the point where stale, bland, uncharacteristic, dead plastic is passable for a living, breathing, fragrant tree with its own personality; a tree that will actually respond and grow with you. So, no, I didn’t get a plastic tree.

The third and better option was to get a live tree somehow. Instead of promoting the massacre of pine trees, I’d keep them alive. It was suggested that I just dig a young one up from the land at Valhalla, pot it, and put it in my living room. If you ask me, that’s not being very nice to the tree either. I’d be uprooting it, transplanting it, and then replanting it in the spring: quite a shock for a tree and not much better than just chopping it down.

The option I went with was to “rescue” a tree. Since it’s the giving (buying) season, I rolled with it and sprung for a 5ft tall cute Charlie Brown inspired tree that was already potted, which I bought from a great garden center near Valhalla. It’s a Fat Albert Blue Spruce, but I named him Albert since he’s sensitive about his weight. Not the traditional Douglas or Fraser Fir tree, I thought it had a more atypical look with its minty blue pine leaves and milk chocolate bark. Mmmm yum… sounds like Christmas already – time to get my eat on.

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