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17. Thinking outside the Box the Christmas tree conundrum – published 28.02.2012

I remember publishing this one on the 28^th February 2013, at that stage the blog was still going out every 2 days.

I had been late getting my tree to the dump that year and for some reason it came back to my mind, taking a photograph of the Christmas tree in the skip.

There are so many things that are utterly ridiculous and none more ridiculous than this but it takes an enormous amount of effort to try and raise the consciousness of people into what has become a habit, which is actually more damaging than productive.

Funnily enough as you read this I will probably be going through the same process again accept there isn’t a tree in our house anymore so there won’t be one to take to the dump; it will just be wrapping paper and plastic containers.

There is a scene in the second Sherlock Holmes movie (directed by Guy Richie with Robert Downey Jr) where someone asks Holmes “what do you see?” and Holmes replies “I see everything, that is my curse”  I think perhaps sometimes I am affected by the same sort of problem.

I took the Christmas tree to the dump, after it had been up in the house for about a fortnight, infact we had 2 trees. As I threw the tree in the skip with the hundreds of other Christmas trees I couldn’t help but think ‘is this absolutely necessary?’

We grow the trees over years, probably in Norway, hack them down in November, bag them up, put them in a container, ship them from there to here, carry them across land in a lorry and sell them in Asda for us to collect in our cars, take home, put them up for a fortnight with baubles on and then throw them in a skip.

Granted, I am sure they probably get recycled again but was it necessary to chop them down in the first place?

The accepted alternative to this is the plastic Christmas tree but I am not sure there is any genuine sentiment in a plastic Christmas tree that doesn’t smell of anything and is just a manufactured piece of material.

So what do we do? It sounds all bah humbug and again a bit weird from Campbell but perhaps it’s time we decorated a tree outside our house that we don’t chop down and then took the decorations off after a fortnight and let the tree grow for another year. That way we wouldn’t have to ship something from another country or grow it for years and chop it down only to throw it in a skip. We could perhaps put the presents somewhere else in the house as we wait for Christmas to come.

Presents at Christmas….? That’s another issue now isn’t it.

Bah humbug.

Blog post number: 1514