To cut or not to cut - getting over my real tree guilt

​I know there are militant anti-tree-choppers out there that say there’s something wrong with the annual harvest – I’m looking your way fake tree manufacturers, Ents, and Kim Jong-un. With all due respect to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Shepherds of the Trees”, cutting down real trees every December is actually better, and here’s why. 

You can’t blame Ents’s leader Treebeard if he’s not a fan of the annual Christmas tree harvest.

First, you can’t beat real trees in the old-school Christmas tree nostalgia department. Second, the eco-footprint of an artificial tree is rather un-Christmassy since the plastic conifers come from far away “mom and pop” factories located in “traditional” Yuletide meccas such as China and Bangladesh. And fake trees are constructed of toxic materials that harm the environment and have EVEN been linked to poisoning some of Santa’s elves and reindeer. It’s all Ho! Ho! Horrendous! For more information on why real trees are better than artificial, click on the following Spruce Meadows link: http://www.sprucemeadowschristmastrees.com/why-buy-real.html
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Rumour has it Rudolph didn’t get his famous red nose from drinking too much eggnog.

​And yet, I must admit I too used to have tree-cutting guilt. WHAT??!!! Yep. I held this belief before I found the ‘light’, and I’ve been a firm believer in getting a real tree ever since.
 
But let me explain why I had this guilt to begin with…
 
I had to get over my anti-chopping attitude fairly quickly because I married into the family that owns and operates Spruce Meadows! But as a kid growing up in Kingston during the 70s and 80s, my family’s Christmas tradition never included a freshly cut spruce of fir. Every December, we used to gather around the step-ladder to watch my late father Hubert crawl into the attic and yank down the large dog-eared Woolco box containing an 8-foot “White Pine Special” with sprayed-on snow blanketing its long needle-tips. (The sound you hear is Charles Dickens rolling in his grave.) 

Needless to say this Charles Dickens story was not inspired by my Woolco “White Pine Special”.

I guess watching Dad connect those wires and posts together using a trusty diagram had its own kind of romantic charm; plus, I didn’t know the difference back then since most families in my neighbourhood also had fake trees.
 
Anyway, back to cutting my first tree…
 
I whittled my choices down to two healthy evergreens but I still harboured niggling pangs of guilt regarding which spruce would be felled by my mighty Paul Bunyan-like axe. ​Actually, I used one of Spruce Meadows’ candy-cane-coloured hacksaws… but it was a manly-looking candy-cane-coloured hacksaw.

I thought I was Paul Bunyan but really the only similarity I had with the mythical American lumberjack was a beard.

My choice didn’t quite rival Sophie’s Choice, nor was I afraid that a squirrel would leap out from the branches and attack my jugular. Nonetheless, the decision was torturous. After some soul-searching and quiet contemplation, I mustered enough courage to pick what I thought was a tree suitable for my apartment’s living-room, and sawed away. I cried and cried and cried, with tears freezing to my face, as I bored through its massive majestic trunk. I dragged the tree back to the farm to be bailed. My father-in-law saw my prize catch, further scarring me with his words: “You cut down a baby!” 

This is what I thought I cut down at Spruce Meadows, but it was much, much, smaller.

​To this day, I swear the 5-footer looked about the size of my old Woolco 8-foot “White Pine Special” when it was still rooted in the field. Humbug!