The
Catchy Title
emotionally attached to Christmas trees since
early December
Buying a Christmas tree is depressing. All the corpses of trees, bound and gagged, waiting to be purchased and stuck into some maniac device that will keep them barely alive. As I walk through the store, they seem to be calling to me, "Put me out of my misery!" They were cut down in the prime of life. Their lives, in fact, were predetermined. They were born on a farm, nurtured and cared for, and then right whenever they have grown to the point that they can survive on their own, they are destroyed. Yet I get one every year.
Why do I end up buying a Christmas tree every year? My dad. He loves Christmas trees. Ever since I can remember, I’d go to some parking lot and pick out the "perfect" tree with him. This year was no different.
He threw me a pair of gloves. They were new leather, but they smelled like something dead. Something that died and was promptly boiled with cabbage, left to dry, and made into gloves. It was the kind of smell that got into your stomach and stayed there like a heavy breakfast. My dad, however, couldn’t smell them, due to his previous sinus surgeries.
"Man, these are stinking up the car," I’d say, gagging on the poison gas that the gloves radiated.
"Really?" he said, unaffected. He pressed one of the gloves up to his nose. "I guess you’re right."
We were finally at Home Depot. I grabbed one glove and sulked towards the tree department. I had the glove on my left hand. It was comfortable enough, but I remembered my aspirations to not smell like a dead cabbage soufflé and promptly removed it.
My dad walked about the store. He carefully studied each tree. He would pick it up, spin it around about thirty degrees, and let it fall back into its original position. "No no no." I could almost hear him thinking. He picked up a particular tree that was off to the side, away from the rows and rows of other trees.
"How about this one?" he asked. I looked at the tree. It seemed nice enough. Perhaps it even touched my heart. It was cast aside, picked over and left to sit idly away from all the other trees.
I didn’t think any of this at the time. At the time, I wasn’t thinking much of anything. I was looking at trees. Dead trees. And I was strangely fine with that. Other than the depressive mood that seeing such trees give me, I was comparatively eager to buy a tree; and also to leave. We looked at a few others before deciding, rather quickly, to go back to the first one. We dragged it to the front.
A man with a chainsaw worked behind a sign that said, "Caution: Chainsaw in Use." The father and son in front of us were addressed by the chainsaw toting man. The man cut the bottom of the trunk. The little kid, his head slightly higher than his father’s knee, asked, "Why’d they cut the tree?" His father tried to explain, but the son kept asking. Finally the father said, slightly annoyed, "I don’t understand what you’re asking!"
And he didn’t.