Ach, Tannenbaum indeed

Ach Tannenbaum,
ach Tannenbaum,
du bist ein edler Zweig!
Du grünest uns den Winter,
die liebe Sommerzeit.

This is to be my absolutely last word on the Christmas season other than to say: Feliz Ano Nuevo to everybody, and let it go at that.

But, I had to have just one more visitation because today is the day the tree comes down. I’m of mixed feelings about that, primarily because the tree provides a nice little décor accent in the room. I once thought it would be a good thing to leave up the Christmas tree year-round and merely change the decorations with each passing month. It could be the Tree for all Seasons. Might be a nice idea.

While much of Christmas is either meaningless or offensive to me, I do like the idea of the tannenbaum. It was a good German addition to our culture, as opposed to Storm Troopers in jackboots tromping up the stairs at 3 a.m., which never did sit well with me.

I used to be a purist about Christmas trees and insisted on having a natural ‘real’ tree. In my earliest times I recall going out with my grandfather to cut our own. My grandmother invariably hated his choice, by the way. Later we bought a tree, but it was still good. It smelled lovely and put an aroma of Christmas in the room. Christmas trees and the arrival of the first mandarin oranges (in little pine boxes, each orange individually wrapped in pale green paper) meant that Christmas was nearly there. Now, of course, mandarins are available year-round and come in crass cardboard boxes, and trees have not only become inordinately expensive, the conventional wisdom of a few years ago held that they were environmentally evil. Why murder a li’l tree before it gets the chance to become a big tree?

So, about five years ago we bought an artificial tree. That was something I vowed I would never do. Artificial trees were to me like silicone enhanced breasts in that they may look real but a certain charm is invariably lost. But, having grown tired of pitch stained carpets, dropping needles, forgetting to water and balky and inadequate tree stands, with thought we would give a fake one a shot. Turned out that we liked it just fine. It looks good, doesn’t drop needles or ooze pitch, and no real tree has been murdered.

This year, however, we were told that the conventional wisdom on trees has changed, and for this I entirely blame Al Gore. He can take it, he won the freakin’ Nobel Prize, for heaven’s sake. Anyway, big Al, or one of his sensitive minions said that artificial trees are environmentally taboo. Not quite at the level of clubbing baby seals or owning a fleet of Hummers, but of impact, nevertheless. You see, if you plant a tree, and even if you chop it down prior to maturity, it has still done good things in terms of carbon footprint. Artificial trees, on the other hand, come from vile, coal-fired factories in China and hence are evil-evil-evil.

Well, I say to Al, go have carnal knowledge of yourself. He can take it (see Nobel Prize.) We’re keeping our fake tree.

And now it’s time to divest the tree of its baubly garb. We both have ornaments from a couple of random marriages we have kicking around in our pasts, plus some from vacations in Europe, S. California, Hawaii, all of which have little stories of their own, so it’s comforting in a way to look at them and muse about their tales of Christmases past.

And then the little faux tree will be folded up and put in a box and life can resume a touch of normality. I don’t mind that.