by Gib Whitney

Created on: June 18, 2009   Last Updated: October 29, 2009

Once almost too long to remember ago, my sister and I were enjoying an afternoon of being left home alone - which was alright to do back then as well as pistol whipping your children since there wasn't all this proper parenting BS to contend with - and aside from trying to figure out what would be the most fun to do while causing the least repercussions, our only appointed task for the day was to remove the dried-up and nearly petrified Christmas tree that was long past being a fire hazard; I think it was sometime in June.

So we took to the task with a vengeance and what seemed like an easy job, soon turned into a prickly nightmare as we attempted to remove the lights and ornaments that were now fused to the tree, while getting as few pine needles on the floor as possible. This done, we then pulled the tree into the back yard where it was to be cut up and put into the trash. At the time, it was unfashionable to just dump the last remains of one's Christmas out onto the street for someone else to deal with, which we would have readily done; I even have a faint recollection that dumping it over our neighbors wall entered our diabolical little minds.

But our higher selves got the best of us and out came the pruning shears and whatever other implements could be found for a quick and painless disposal, which idea soon got ditched as we found the wood to be much harder then the tender soft-spots on our hands that could endure. What to do, what to do. And in a crystallized moment invented out of necessity, we knew what to do; burn the bloody thing. Since burning it outside would pose a problem and the smoke would attract obvious attention, we decided to do the next best thing and burn it inside our house in the fireplace. Now this was no small tree and it was all we could do to cram it in the fireplace, but cram we did and in it went.

As we lit the match and proceeded to commit the last vestige of our holidays to an unceremonious departure, a twist of fate would soon turn that tree into a veritable yuletide terror since unbeknownst to us, the trap on the chimney closed while we were stuffing it into the fireplace. And not unlike Dante and his Inferno, as our match touched the wood, the tree's own three sins were instantly revealed which quickly erupted in a violent, malicious, and self-indulgent uprising that created a personal hell for us as the dried thing won the moment and menacingly sparked into the greatest of conflagrations. My sister and I watched in horror as

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