In defense of REAL Christmas trees

Year after year it gets worse. More and more people talk about their "Christmas trees," which actually are the equivalent of plastic and metal ornament hangers. I remember when these things started taking hold a fairly long time ago, but back then they really looked bad -- bad as in they looked like a bunch of big, green, furry pipecleaners attached to a central stem. Now they're just an affront to my sensibilities, not that this matters to anyone.

As an example of my background, I offer a picture of me in about 1954 or so in front of our family Christmas tree.



Yep, that's me in diapers, with a great, big floor to ceiling tree with BIG lights on it. Oh, and a nativity scene placed in a built-in niche over the mantle of the fireplace (horror of horrors -- I'm sure this will offend some Muslims somewhere and spur on complaints).

The first picture, at the top, is our current tree. I have some of the same strings of lights from the '50s passed down from my mom (you see her in the photo, now dead). They still work, braided cloth insulation and all, with METAL clips to hold the Bakelite sockets on the branches. None of that plastic stuff. Yes, I use, horror of horrors, those C7 bulbs -- I suppose they'll be banned anyday as hazardous, just as REAL lead tinsel -- called "icicles" by most these days -- was banned long ago. That in itself sucks. It's not as though I ever knew anyone who ate tinsel. The old stuff hung down wonderfully, and there was an added bonus: when we got bored with watching our Lionel train zooming around the track, you could string it across that three-rail track, turn the transformer on and enjoy a bunch of sparks as it shorted the thing out and blew a fuse. My brother and I loved that. My dad, however, was always wondering what the hell was going on with the fuses, and accused my mom of running too many appliances in the kitchen at the same time.

Anyhow, during college I endured another abomination: twinkle lights. They exist now in many forms, with people expressing horror that I still use the big ones. Nuts. As a child of the fifties, twinkle lights on a Christmas tree are about as enjoyable as hanging used teabags on your dog or something. Lights on a Christmas tree are supposed to be reminiscent of the original custom: putting CANDLES on a tree (I suppose my wife, ten years younger than me and therefore immersed in the twinkle light culture, considers herself lucky that I didn't grow up in the 1800s and follow the candle tradition). Anyhow, there is NO WAY that twinkle lights remind anyone of candles. Those big C7 bulbs are what I grew up with, and my wife, early in our relationship, after a feeble stab at wanting a compromise of running twinkle lights up the trunk of the tree and letting me have the big bulbs on the outside -- my mouth dropped open in horror at that thought, as I remember -- has given up and assumed that we will, indeed, have the big lights on our tree. And actually, I think she's grown to like them. You'll be proud to know that I did indeed make my own compromise: in her youth they had little things called bubble lights on her tree, so I added a few here and there to the strings of lights. Oh, and I let her have blinking big bulbs here and there. However, that's as far astray from the Christmases of my youth as I have gone, and it's really not all that bad.

Besides the style of the big lights, people are horrified at the thought that anyone who uses them in combination with a real tree (a tree being an actual organic object) is hovering close to wanting to commit suicide. The numbers of people who use real trees at Christmas are dwindling, which probably explains why it costs around $60 - $80 these days for a decent eight-footer. They only sell about a half-dozen of them in the US, if I can go by what everyone tells me. NO ONE I KNOW uses a real tree. It's NUTS! Christmas these days reminds me of a spoof book I own, published at the time of one of the traveling exhibitions of King Tut's relics in the US, entitled Motel of the Mysteries. In that book, a future archaeologist discovers and excavates what he claims is an ancient funerary complex (actually a 60s motel called the Toot 'n' Cmon Motel). In one of the "chambers" of this complex, he finds a miraculous artifact from this long-dead civilization -- which was driven to extinction by the country of USA (pronounced YOOSA) being buried under an avalanche of junk mail -- the "plant that would not die" (a plastic plant). When I see these Christmas "trees" I always think about that plant.

Here's the deal: I've never had a tree go up like a Roman candle, and I've never known anyone else who did, either. I'm astonished that the sacrifice of living trees hasn't also been banned after protests by Greenpeace, but now that I say it, who knows?

Christmas, as they say, comes but once a year. If I wanted to look at a fake plant, I could go sit in my doctor's office. Children need the sights, the sounds, and the smells (as in an actual tree smell) of Christmas. They grow up soon enough.




Screw fake trees.

Next up: people who consider it baking to go to the store, buy a tube of Pop 'n Fresh dough, and cook pieces of it on a cookie sheet as opposed to, as noted in the last post, actually mixing flour and sugar up with a couple other things and MAKING THEIR OWN (gasp -- what a concept!).