Day 300…
The streets of New York are strewn with dead Christmas trees.
During my walk, yesterday, all I could hear in my head was the clanging of the bells and the shouts of “Bring out your dead” from the movie of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
From now through January 15, as long as there is nothing still attached to them, the Sanitation Department will collect the trees and chip them for composting. The Park system has also set up several stations where you can drop off your tree before December 9 and they will use it as mulch in their plantings during the coming year.
People have used evergreen branches in their homes as decorations for thousands of years. Pagans used them as a reminder that spring was coming. Christians used them as a sign of their God’s immortality. Ancient Romans brought boughs indoors during the feast of Saturnalia over the solstice to celebrate the fact that spring was coming. The Druids and the Vikings also did much the same thing.
Germany during the 1500’s gets the credit for being the first place where whole trees were brought indoors. Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer, reportedly was the first person who added candles to the branches of his in an attempt to replicate what trees outside looked like with the starts twinkling through them.
The custom did not catch on here until the mid 1800’s. Queen Victoria, who was married to a German, was sketched, with her family around a decorated tree in 1846. Given her popularity, everyone immediately started emulating her and the tradition caught on. Wealthy American east-coasters with their eyes on fashion, then picked up on it and it subsequently spread everywhere.
Once electricity became available, so did Christmas tree lights. By the 1900’s, trees lit with colored bulbs started appearing in town squares.
Nowadays, in the US, Christmas trees are a $2 billion a year business.
There are about 15 thousand tree farms in the country. While every state has them, two out of three trees come from just four states: Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Oregon. In Oregon, Christmas trees reportedly outnumber people by twelve to one.
Unlike other crops which come up every year, it takes from eight to ten years for a tree to mature to the point where it can be sold for the holidays. It’s an expensive and work-intensive product to grow. A lot of labor and fertilizer gets expended over a decade.
Each year, farmers have to decide how many to plant. Too many, which is what happened in the 1990’s, there’s a glut on the market and prices drop. In the early 2000’s that surplus actually put many farms out of business. Too few, which is what happened during the 2008 recession, and prices go up. That’s what we’ve seen here in New York for the last few years. Trees here these days typically go for anywhere between $150 and $200.
This year, with many more people staying home, our neighborhood Christmas tree stands ran out of trees several days before the holiday. I hope that farmers don’t interpret the increase in sales this year as a trend and start planting more in anticipation that this increased demand will still be here ten years from now.
Today is the twelfth and final day of Christmas. Tomorrow, Catholics and Orthodox Christians will celebrate the Epiphany or the Feast of the Three Kings. On that day, according to Christian lore, the three Wise Men, or Kings, followed the star and visited the Christ child in the manager bearing gifts. Some churches will also celebrate tomorrow as the day, thirty years later, when Jesus was baptized and started preaching.
Tomorrow also feels like it’s going to be the day that begins the next era of our political life.
Steve Kornacki is back at his white board on MSNBC standing by to tabulate results as the Senate run-off elections get underway this morning in Georgia.
As strange as it seems, the results of this state election will literally dictate the course that the whole government of the United States will take over the next two years. If control of the Senate goes to the Democrats, they will be able, for better or for worse, dictate what gets legislated and what doesn’t. If control remains in Republican hands, then nothing will be accomplished as the current Senate Majority Leader will remain in his position and continue to obstruct all Democratic attempts to legislate at all.
The Republicans only need to win one of the seats. It seems more likely that they will do that than they won’t, but it is by no means a sure thing. It’s going to be close and it could go either way.
County by county, our guy Steve is going to be at it all day.
Tomorrow is the day that the Vice President, in a joint session of Congress, announces the results of the electoral vote.
Several times this morning, I have heard newscasters describe what he is actually going to do as being the same thing that presenters at the Oscars do when they announce the winners. The votes have been cast, Price Waterhouse have tabulated the results and Julia Roberts is merely going to announce the winner.
In 2016, when announcing the Best Picture of the year, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were handed the wrong envelope. Instead of Best Picture they were handed a copy of the envelope that awarded Emma Stone the Best Actress award for the movie La La Land. Somewhat confused, Dunaway announced La La Land as best picture, but then the mistake was caught and the correct winner, Moonlight, was announced.
Similarly, the Vice President cannot announce something tomorrow that isn’t in the envelope. He can actually say anything he likes but anything other than what’s in the envelope won’t stick. The results are the results and we all know what they are.
Because of a blizzard, in 1887 Wisconsin missed the deadline to deliver its five electoral votes. Republicans tried to get them disqualified but failed and James Buchanan, a Democrat, was certified as the winner regardless.
The precedent was set by that election and rules were put into place so that tomorrow, despite whatever objections are raised, Joseph R. Biden and Kamala D. Harris will be confirmed and certified as the new President and Vice President of the United States.
There is no legal basis for throwing out any of the results. Republicans have already challenged them in a myriad of specious lawsuits that have all, except one, been thrown out by the courts. The one that wasn’t thrown out, has no bearing on the final tally.
Like the Academy Awards, tomorrow’s exercise is a ceremony. Period. La La Land did not win best picture and the President did not win another term.
While an incomprehensible amount of energy is spent giving space to seditious Republicans trying to make more of this than is possible, Americans are actually dying. Hospitals are so packed in Los Angeles, that ambulance crews have been told not to bring in people who have a low chance of survival.
Imagine what it would be like to be home with a beloved family member who was so sick that you could no longer care for them yourself. You call 911 and after an endless delay, the EMTs finally show up, look at your loved one and say, “I’m sorry. They aren’t going to make it.”
Then they leave.
And you are left with a loved one who is dying in front of you with nobody able to offer any care.
And then they die.
Now imagine this little nobody of a Senator from Missouri smugly trying to throw a wrench into the certification process for no other reason other than to draw attention to himself. He is engaging in a potentially treasonous political stunt so that people remember him four years from now when he decides to run for President.
All around him, Republicans who could have changed the deadly course of this pandemic at any point, are instead, joining him in this dangerous stunt. All of the energy that could have been channeled into a nationwide attack against the ravages of this virus are instead being diverted to hoaxes, conspiracy theories and self-serving grandstanding.
“Bring out your dead,” is one of the most repeated laugh lines in a film full of some of the funniest lines in cinema history. I don’t think that people in Los Angeles would find it all that funny these days. Soon, many other places probably won’t either.
300 days ago, our lives changed radically.
300 days later, we are nearing 21 million cases of COVID-19 in this country. 354 thousand people have died either from it or from complications due to it. We have watched our federal government curl up in a ball and do nothing in response to it. Nothing. The virus has been allowed to rage unchecked.
Instead, members of this Administration are trying to destroy the norms of our government and undermine our confidence in them. Their every action is a danger to our democracy.
Over the next few days, we are likely to see some truly anxiety-provoking events unfold. We will get through it.
There is little of actual substance behind any of this - it is mostly bluff and bluster. The President of the United States and his family are looking at a seemingly endless stream of legal troubles ahead and he is doing everything he can to try and avoid them. The more noise, the more chaos, the more terror he inspires, the better the chances he has of slipping past it all.
He is going to pull out all of the stops because he is fighting for his life. He will take everyone around him down with him if he has to. We can’t buy into any of it. The more of his supporters who go down with his ship, the better off all of the rest of us will be.
We had a good Christmas tree this year. It’s still up and still decorated, but the time has finally come to take it down.
I am always of two minds when it comes to using a live tree. It is, after all, a living thing. But an artificial tree requires plastics and mined minerals to create it. When they are discarded, they don’t decompose, they just add to the ever-growing mountain of garbage on our planet.
A real tree, while it is growing, adds oxygen to the atmosphere. It helps scrub the air of its impurities. It offers shelter to other creatures. Land that might otherwise be developed is kept clear for them to grow. Given the years necessary for them to get big enough, jobs continue through good times and bad. Once the holidays are over and the trees are mulched, those same trees then help the next generation grow.
The storms we have ahead of us will eventually subside and the days will start to get longer and warmer. Spring is coming. In more ways than one.
In the meantime, hunker down. The next few days will, at the very least, be extremely interesting.
While I’m watching Steve, I’m going to start packing up the ornaments.
It might get dark early, but today’s going to be a long one.
❤️My mother used to use January 6 / Little Christmas we called it.... to make-up for Christmas she didn’t get quite right...January 6 / The Three Wise men will arrive bringing the real gifts
I expect this tomorrow for all of us...waiting