O Christmas tree, how desperately
Do I suddenly wish it was January.
O Christmas tree, how readily
Would I stuff you in the green bin, seriously.
The author’s Christmas tree adorned with gifts and baubles. (Just watch out for the latter – they fall like rocks.)Credit:
There you go, Mariah Carey. Let’s see you take those lyrics and turn them into a new yuletide money-spinner. I, meanwhile, will go back to sulking about the hideous, deteriorating, obnoxious colossus that’s taken up squatter’s rights in my living room, where it will spend the next three weeks being feted by misty-eyed visitors who’ll waltz in, take a noisy snootful of pine tree, and exclaim joyfully that the whole place smells like Christmas.
To which I say the following.
First, Christmas does not smell like anything because Christmas does not have a smell. Second, even if it did, in my house the scent is inevitably accompanied by subtle undertones of eau de profane language from the resident control freak (that would be me) charged with hydrating the base and chasing pine needles out of floorboards.
Third, this notion that the more the tree decays, the better it smells, is a falsehood cooked up by the ghosts of Christmas marketing doo-wop to distract from the fact they’ve successfully charged a premium for a big, withering corpse.
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The irony is, the only thing in our place more hellbent than me on hastening its demise is the tree itself, which starts December a bottle-green behemoth, spends a month in a boiling living room, and ends it as relentlessly brown and spiky as a Grinch’s toenail.
Having said all this, I fully acknowledge that I am a lone voice in the wilderness (read: my house), bleating listlessly about the aesthetic benefits of a glorious artificial alternative. In recent years, the farm my family buys a tree from has instituted an online ticketing system for anyone who wants to tag one in person before it is cut down about a month later. In effect, this means we now join a virtual queue to join an actual queue after driving halfway across Sydney to eyeball our victim ahead of schedule.
And by “ahead of schedule”, I mean “the virtual queue opens in October”, which should preclude all but the most obsessive Christmas crackpots from getting involved. As if. Friends, last year I logged on at the appointed hour and the tickets were all snapped up within nine minutes. I practically emerged with a footprint in my forehead.
