Being the season and all, Jane and I just set up our old workhorse of a fake Christmas tree, a ten-year-old Douglas Fir simulacrum from Seasonal Concepts, the world’s leading experts at determining which things are conceptually appropriate to which season. They’re marketed as “permanent trees,” implying that they’ll not only outlast a cut tree thrust into a pot of water with some baby aspirin, but also a live potted tree, a tree left in the forest to grow for centuries, The Acropolis in Greece and the planet itself.

Originally we bought the thing because we thought it would be more environmentally friendly than chain-sawing a live evergreen and bringing it into our house to die, but apparently we’re wrong. Not only are we wrong, we’re cursed by environmentalists for clogging landfills and amassing a carbon footprint bigger than Yao Ming’s Reeboks. Worse yet, our seemingly innocent little tree was probably made from pure carcinogens, stuffed with Brown Fir Longhorned Beetles and angrily assembled at a sweatshop in China where chain-smoking factory slaves work sixty hours per day and for lunch receive a kick in the stomach and a mug of lead paint. To top it off, the fume-spewing earth-hating carcinogens that make up our festive tree are so flammable that a single warm bulb could set off a firestorm hot enough to turn the metropolitan area into a neutron star.

But that’s not the worst part, not for me. After ten years our tree’s become rather dusty. It’s an inherent problem: how do you dust off a Christmas tree, with a leaf blower? In doing research for this posting, I learned that household dust, while routinely containing dozens of hazardous chemicals, is largely composed of human skin cells. Skin, plus a cattle range of dust mites and a light peppering of their fecal pellets. This means O Tannenbaum is caked with ten years’ worth of human skin, from everyone who ever walked though our door: Our grimy friends, soiled family, filthy babies, the guy who fixed our dishwasher twice; all of them callously sloughing off their scaly epithelia. It’s a different kind of tinsel than I’m used to.

What to do? We can’t just toss our fake tree lest Greenpeace get all up in our holiday grill. The only logical thing is to shanghai the three into the shower, where skin cells respectfully run down the drain, hit the tree with all manner of Aveda product, then deck the halls as usual and remind myself never to let anyone wearing skin through my door, ever again. Besides, the tree still looks respectable when gussied up with lights and ornaments, and if I want to look at a real tree, I can just go out my door and gaze on the forty-foot Black Spruce–a native species by the way–growing in our yard, a fine habitat for a variety of birds and squirrels.

Merry Christmas everybody. Get off my back, Greenpeace.

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