Love affair with Christmas trees

Nearly everyone has an opinion about whether you should have a real Christmas tree or an artificial one. Could it be that by picking one or the other, you are either destroying the environment or changing the spirit of Christmas?

by Aditha Dissanayake

I remember how I muttered soothing words to the three cypress plants in my hands, as I lugged them from Thalawakelle to Lake House, three hundred days ago to this day.

"I know the temperature is a little too high, But hold on. Do hold on till you settle down in your new home" I talked to the tender green stems which formed intricate patterns on the slim branches. I knew I was not being a crank, because if talking to plants is considered a bit droll then Charles Windsor too falls into this category. My sole aim was to hand the three plants in good health to my colleague Rajitha, and to meet this end I was ready to go to any extent -even to talk to them to keep their spirits up.

I do not know if Rajitha continued the monologue I had begun with the plants but almost a year later from the photos he shows me I know my three orphans had found the best home they would ever find in his garden. When Rajitha says he will be decorating the tallest of the three this Christmas in lieu of the branch of cypress he used to buy every year, I feel the kind of joy Al Gore would have felt when he won the Nobel Peace prize this year. I am happy I could do something to help save the environment.

Now that alarm bells have begun to ring regarding the deteriorating health of mother nature, surely it is high time that we add eco consciousness or, eco-anxiety (to steal a phrase from the essay "Its Inconvenient Being Green" by Lisa Cullen), to our growing list of worries. So, to the questions which is better? "Real or artificial" Should you buy a cut tree or one that's growing in a pot, which you can re-plant in your garden after a year or two?

Each has its pros and each has its cons. Though economically it is cheaper to buy artificial trees environmentalists believe they cause the most amount of harm. A cruise round the World Wide Web reveals that fake trees are made from non-renewable plastics and petroleum-based products. Lead is apparently used to stabilize them, which is why you'll see a label on faux Christmas trees cautioning you to avoid inhaling or eating any bits of lead dust that may fall from the "branches" of the "tree" in your sitting room. Although some people claim that these trees last a lifetime, most are thrown away within ten years - and remain in landfill sites for centuries.

Luckily, this year, some sales managers have stopped selling artificial trees in their showrooms. Susil Pathirana the Sales Manager of a private firm in Peliyagoda says this year they have stopped buying imported plastic trees. "We have started to sell real, but dried branches of cypress" is how he explains this new venture. "We buy the trees from manufacturers who make them for the international market. So they are of high quality." The prices too are a bit high. A tree costs somewhere round Rs. 10,000.

"There are real branches of cypress trees for less, of course" says an officer at the Department of Forestry. "Prices range from Rs. 400 to Rs. 1000".

The department has its own Cypress forests from which branches are cut by the Timber Corporation and transported to Colombo during the Christmas season. Every year around three hundred to four hundred branches taken from these forests are used for Christmas decor ations. "They cause no harm to the environment" says the spokesman "because they are lopped from our cypress plantations".

But for eco-anxious folks like me cutting a branch off a tree is just as painful as paying for an artificial non-renewable one. So, the best choice is surely the "Grow a tree in a pot" option. Or the option of making your own tree as the wives of planters in Nuwara Eliya do using the roots of tea bushes dabbed in white paint. There is also, of course the "Don't decorate a tree at all!" option, but this is asking for environment monk hood, which is going a bit too far.

But there is much to do if we are to leave our planet in a fit state for those who come after us. So let us celebrate this Christmas in such a way that it will be a one mighty leap towards keeping mother earth in good health. Grow your own Christmas tree. Remember, this December - good planets are hard to find.