Lets Kill a Tree for Christmas

My wife and I try to be environmentally conscious, even if we think the term “green” this-and-that is overused and stupid. The staunchest conservative wants a cleaner planet and wants to conserve nature as much as the tree-hugging liberal does.

Anyway, we were driving down Santa Monica Boulevard the other day and saw a truck pass by us filled with pine trees and the words, “Living Christmas Trees” emblazoned on the back of the tailgate. What a great idea, we agreed: this way, after we use the tree for our Christmas holiday, someone will just pick it up and plant it somewhere. Isn’t that a lot better than buying a tree already in the act of dying, only to have it shed most of its needles on the carpet and then be discarded into a landfill?

People who own houses and have plenty of room on their property can buy a live tree for a reasonable price, use it in their home for Christmas and then plant it in their yard. But what about us apartment dwellers? I found a couple small companies online that will rent live trees and pick them up after the Holidays, but they were unclear about the price and how to order a tree from them; some had numerous forms for the customer to fill out. Surely there has to be an easier way.

Then I found (apparently) the only “real” company that rents Christmas trees in Southern California and thought that we were finally in business… until I checked the prices. For the ugliest tree they offered, they were charging $115 for a 4-foot tree—and the height includes the container, which is nearly a foot tall. Are they serious? Over $38 per foot? When I can go to a local stand and buy a far superior cut tree for less than a third of that?  If you want to get a really nice living tree from this company, like a fir that’s 8 feet tall, that will run you over $300!

 More proof that most of the environmentalists are rich; who else can afford to spent over $100 on a crappy Christmas tree that’s only 3 feet high, let alone three times that much for a halfway decent tree?

Of course, the “green” tree people will tell you that it’s better for the environment to rent a living tree, because they “create more oxygen”, which is true—but we have woods, the oceans and rain forests all over the planet doing that already. The planet’s oxygen level is just fine.

Here are some facts about cut trees: while growing, they create oxygen, too, not that it really matters; more importantly, they scrub CO2 from the air like all trees, which environmentalists will tell you is critical because CO2 is poison! (Never mind that we all exhale it with every breath.) Tree farming is a very large industry in this country; if everyone buys living trees, unemployment goes up. Furthermore, don’t let anyone con you into believing that cut Christmas trees diminish the size of our forests; the trees are grown on farms, not harvested from forests. Lastly, recycled Christmas trees are ground up into mulch, which is used to fertilize other plants, and that can’t be a bad thing. However, the bottom line is this: cut trees cost too much but are affordable; living trees are not.

So join me in supporting America’s Christmas tree farmers and kill a tree for Christmas!