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DEATH OF A CHRISTMAS TREE

Written Christmas Season 2005

Early January 2006 - millions of once living, beautiful Christmas trees a few months ago, will lie in garbage heaps along roadways, streets, avenues, lanes, alleyways, whatever - tossed there by people who'd just had them adorned with lights and ornaments in their living rooms.

In August 2003, I drove up to the Adirondacks for a week's vacation in Lake Placid, and on my way home I drove east toward a Lake Champlain ferry to Vermont (decided I'd have a diversion from the normal route home), and I passed a field of Christmas trees, all in rows, not as they are naturally in the wilderness, obvious to me what they were there for - the kill - hauled off to various vendors who'd sell them for a two-to-four week exhibition in people's living rooms - decorated, becoming a very short-lived part of holiday festivity - then in early January, disposed of for garbage pickup. The empty fields where they once were - perhaps in a few years, will have new rows of Christmas trees, there for a future holiday slaughter. There must be thousands of these fields of Christmas trees, serving that same purpose.

Below is a story I wrote in 2001 concerning this:

The tree you see in this photo (there was one, tossed onto the street, some tinsel left) may have been more fortunate than many, even though it had been a victim of murder a month or more earlier. At least it had been given a few weeks' glory in someone's home, decorated with lights, ornaments, garlands, icicles, and what-have-you. Yet, how undignified, to simply toss this tree into a garbage heap along an East 60s Street in New York City, such glory at an end as a new year begins! Couldn't the people who bought this tree have thought of a better way to say good-bye to something that made their Christmas merry? There was a time when it was legal to burn street rubbish, and even this would have been a better way to dispose of this tree! As I took the picture of the poor little tree, probably no more than equivalent to a human in his or her 20s, I thought of the 50 to 75 million others in the United States that had been or soon would be similarly dumped along the roadsides, to be carted away by garbage trucks!

This past year 2001 (2005 too), starting in October, truckloads of freshly killed Christmas trees made their way to American neighborhoods. It seems every year, the date gets pushed back a little when the Christmas season begins! It seems to start

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