KNOW YOUR CHRISTMAS TREE

There are two ways to look at a Christmas tree: real or not.

The latter kept in a box you’ve stored in the attic – or basement. For how long? Ten years?

Most of us buy one or other to celebrate the season, pretty much sticking to one of them year after year.

We have friends who insist on the artificial tree, it being environmentally friendlier. Whereas the real tree is dumped by the curb after the holidays to be picked up by a garbage truck, along with whatever else you’re tossing out.

The good news? Many are picked up separately from the garbage, turned into mulch and recycled back into the earth.

I’m told during the Christmas season, the aroma of a coniferous tree indoors, raises the dopamine (?) levels in the brain, which makes us feel better. No one ever told me that.

Author’s comment: And this: A truck from Trenton, Nova Scotia, makes a 1,100 km. trek to Boston, Mass. to drop off a large, 13.7 meters high – 44 feet - Christmas tree. As a gift. It’s to show ‘the province’s gratitude for Bostonians who helped out after the devastating Halifax explosion in December 1917’.

It happened, I’ve been told, every year since.