Back in early January, as the weather was bleak and the sun was hiding behind a thick blanket of clouds, I was walking back home from work. I stumbled across several piles of discarded Christmas trees. And it made me think how ephemeral the lives of these trees were, and at the same time how ridiculous this habit of buying a Christmas tree is.
See, in December, you go buy a tree. You decorate it and display it in your house for a few days. And then after Christmas, you just take it down and discard it at the curb, waiting for the garbage collector to pick it up. I can't help but think that this is actually quite wasteful.
When we were in Denmark, we saw plenty of Christmas tree farms. Denmark happens to be a very large producer of Christmas trees, which we didn't know until recently. There were vast lands full of small trees growing, waiting to be chopped when they have reached their desired size. People all over Europe would then buy it, so that they could use it for a few days, satisfying their religious delusional fantasies. But come to think of it, it's bizarre that such a joint fantasy would spur an entire industry where trees are grown only so that they can be decorated for a few days, and then discarded afterwards.
Religion is bizarre, isn't it?
