Welcome to this Sunday’s Third Degree: Tough, Brief, Weekly Interrogations on matters public and private that force thinking and response. Today we target: Decoration

  • Is the annual, Christmas search for the perfect tree an essential, often expensive, at times, exasperating part of the season?
  • Can cold and wet be added to the list for the 35 million Christmas trees sold in the United States from a tree farm inventory of over 350 million?
  • With Europe buying 60 to 70 million Yule Trees a year, are we into serious coniferous consumption?
  • Of the 43 popular varieties, why do the Fraser and Balsam Fir plus the Scotch Pine top the perfect list?
  • Prefer sharp needles? Not easy to be eccentric as you decorate (ouch) your perfect Blue Spruce?
  • If conformality and size concern, isn’t that why you bought the chain saw?
  • Does Chevy Chase and “Christmas Vacation” offer a host of valuable (and quotable) lessons you can’t get on YouTube?
  • Is the easy part, the driving, choosing, maybe cutting, buying, hoisting and scratching top of car, almost losing the tree on the highway, playing dodge car after “re-bungeeing” then home with pleasurable erection thoughts in mind?
  • Does reality dim ardor as hours of effort ensue until finally, you’ve done it, you’ve gotten it up?
  • Family decoration time?
  • From basement and attic (rethink storage in January), do pack mule-like, the boxes appear and dad strings the tangled lights with an enviable minimum of justifiable profanity?
  • So far, not even one trip to the hardware store or hospital, as the decoration detail springs into action and dad takes a booze break?
  • Using calamitous climate change logic and science, how many ornaments per foot of tree are deemed correct?
  • Would you believe, like the weather and projections, there is a sizeable range?
  • How about between ten and fifty ornaments of various sizes per foot? Settled science?
  • But it’s perfect, isn’t it?
  • Ornaments loved, memories from early, marriage years, or the folks, and, in our case, add the little, hand-made drum from the old country, almost 150 years old, with dripped candle wax still intact?
  • Christmas and the tree, no matter the kind, the size, the decoration, just like Mary Poppins “Practically perfect in every way” and so it is and so we wish it for you and others, we most blessed Americans?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living”. The answers and actions are yours?