so a cut tree is better ?

Are Real Christmas Trees Necessary?

 Tree-Incarnation: Christmas Trees Return To Nature (A Poem) : NPR

        I am not trying to bah humbug Christmas but as a grower of trees and Christmas trees or pines as I refer to them, I take offense to the wasting of trees for the purposes of Christmas. I am not a big fan of artificial trees either but when our environment is heating up and we need to plant more trees to buffer the effects of global warming. Can we justify continuing to use real cut trees at Christmas for celebrating the event. I used a real tree this year and will plant or sell it to whomever but eventually it will end up being reused as a real tree and continue its life outside doing what it does best. Capturing solar energy and transforming it into fuel. Locking up carbon for 30 to 60 years and providing habitat for small animals. If I kill it the best purpose it has is to release carbon dioxide to the air as well as methane as it decays, and possibly serve as habitat for fish and seashore protection as it rots.

     The average price of a Christmas tree is going for around twenty five a tree and is used primarily for Christmas decoration and is usually destroyed shortly after as it serves no real purpose but to symbolize Christmas. But the destruction starts as soon as you cut the tree. I noticed in an article the other day how different trees symbolize different things in our culture. Oaks represent one thing as well other trees have a purpose of symbolizing their importance. Ten trees were listed and all lived but the Christmas tree or pine that was cut in its infancy to fit into our living rooms and provide no real purpose but to shelter our materialistic need to have a spending holiday, as if we can afford to cut down millions of trees to just have Christmas. It was the number one tree in symbolism, though showing how ignorant we can all be when it comes to giving. What did we give the living thing called a tree but an axe to cut its life short? Hmmmmmm. Food for thought.

       Then to quantify our need for live trees to kill, NPR or national public radio comes out with an article applauding all the uses for cut, spent Christmas trees after we have opened the presents and tore down the trees and hardly retrieved all the tinsel. We now take this to the seashore and use it to help make more sand dunes for the rich and wealthy so that they can rebuild their coastal homes and forbid the common man from sharing it. Sounds like a plan. So we all pay homeowner insurance for them to rebuild after a hurricane and provide them with spent Christmas trees so they can dance along the seashore on sand beaches with their toes in the sand without being bothered by commoners.

     I am not against rich people but instead stupid thinking, as it seems to be rampant today. Most of the time I read NPR and agree with them but this should be a story I felt they should have distanced themselves from. Beach erosion is a natural event and if we lose beach then so be it , we are probably gaining one somewhere else. The trouble is most of us won’t have access to it. Yet we pay for protecting it and if someone loses a beachfront house we couldn’t afford, our homeowners insurance is raised to cover their loss. So why should I care if trees that were intentionally cut down saves anyone’s beach front property. The same goes with all the other uses for a Christmas tree after it is cut. Allowed to grow it would have replaced all the wood lost when the hurricane rolled through. But then again I don’t think we should be paying for any damage to our coasts and that it should be free to tread on by all without any cost to anyone as it should all be public land. No beachfront mansions for anyone.  And if you want to live close enough to an area prone to flooding do so at your own risk and let nature take its course.

     As for Christmas trees, we should look at making artificial trees more realistic and reusable. Maybe install little pine scent tubes in the tips of the branches to get that fresh pine scent and slap some waxy ear substance on them to get that sticky feeling we have come to accept as part of the process. But in the end, to really hold a tree in esteem no matter the variety as we move along on the uncertain path of global warming as if saving a tree's life might be worth saving ours.