It hasn't, of course, stopped me from having Christmas trees. But every year at Thanksgiving I wonder what it would be like to have a house with an atrium where our live Christmas tree grew, decorated in late November and undecorated in early January, a member of the family, growing tall with our kids.
This year, for the second or third year in a row, our discarded Christmas tree is propped perfectly vertical in a backyard snow bank. It adds architecture to the yard, relieves the monotony of white, and, as whatever broadside that gave us the idea promised, it gives shelter to the birds. It looks perfectly alive, green and healthy, and it will until the snow melts. Then it will fall over, and all the needles will come off at once, and it will be a skeleton instead of a body, lying on its side in the middle of the spring rebirth.
In perfect non sequitur it will remind me of another friend, a man I knew when I was a vegetarian. "You know," I told him one day, "pigs are really smart animals, you shouldn't eat them." To which he replied, "that's exactly the animals I want to be eating, the really smart ones."
