Okay, it's Monday. Can I stop here? The official kick-off of cold & flu season has arrived. In Michigan we have a parade to celebrate the event. Floats with giant hypodermic needles, children dressed as bacteria and viruses, scouting troops tossing handfulls of cough drops into the wheezing crowd. It's all very magical, really.
At any rate, I'll suffer through my first bout, ten rounds, no whining, and get through the week.
We crossed over to the dark side this weekend. Yes, that's right, we bought an artificial Christmas tree. Although I do love the smell of fresh cut pine in my living room, the magic disappears after about a week when the needles begin carpeting the carpet. There's also the minor back pain after trudging through snow, cutting down the perfect tree (which looks more like Charlie Brown's tree when we get it home), and hauling it a mile back to the pick-up spot because children can never find the perfect tree ten feet from the road. And now that spruce is up to $40 a pop, I figure it's time to join the faux Christmas crowd.
Besides, the tree is a cast-off of some pagan ritual anyway. No trees in the manger. Maybe a palm branch. How come we don't have palm trees for Christmas? It would be easier to clean up. Just a hundred or so great big leaves. Then you can save them for Easter. Unless, of course, you opt for the artificial palm tree. Then you'd have to buy artificial dead palm branches for Easter.
Palm trees would bring disastrous results for the Michigan Christmas tree farms. Even more than the deer. Some business, I think it was a golf course, on M-24, the main road shooting up into the Thumb, planted about six full grown palm trees along the road a few years ago. Really. I don't know where he got 'em or how much he paid for the transplant, but he was obviously not the quickest bunny in the roost (check out more at www.mixedmetaphors.com!). The trees wilted sometime around early August, then turned brown before fall. Last time I checked, palm trees aren't supposed to change colors with the seasons. So, he did what any good Michigander would, he spray painted the branches green. I don't make this stuff up. I don't have to. I live in Michigan.
So, since WNIC is already playing 24hrs of Christmas music, let me wish you all a very Merry Christmas. Drag your local ACLU member under the mistletoe and give him a big wet one on the lips. Then charge him with sexual harassment.
Now go out and cut down those palm trees! I'll give you directions to the golf course.
3 comments:
Well, most Christian rituals are pagan in origin, so I wouldn't worry so much about that. We've got some nice little fertility rites (eggs and bunnies and chicks, anybody?) going on in the spring and our celebration of lights ties into the shortest day of the year, but anyway...
We went the artificial tree route a few years back. That's largely because wife and kiddies were getting contact dermatitis and eye infections just having the things in the house. I can definitely live without the mess when you drag the dead thing out of the house, and I confess to an overly mature aversion to having a tinderbox set up in my living room with 15-year-old live electrical wiring draped over it. Now if we could just get it to smell like a pine tree...
Oh, please, Mr. Man...you sound like a scrouge, which I know you aren't.
**Come to the dark side, Luke!
ROTFL!!! Funny post. As a former Floridian, I say the dude who sprayed the palm trees green needs a few pink flamingos to go with them. Dare ya to stick a few in tonight. Hee hee...
(shakes head) Can't believe you went fake. ;-)
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