A Christmas tree on the curb for pick up in D.C.
It's hard enough parting with one's own Christmas tree, but to find someone else's in the trash, still decorated, still full of lights and little silver ornaments and a glittery red star: This is more than anyone should bear on a gray Monday twixt Christmas and New Year's.
It was a table top model, still in its tiny stand, now orphaned in an alley between the recycling bins and the plastic trash dumpsters. The spot is well trafficked with Amazon boxes, broken down Ikea furniture and sundry empty paint cans, milk crates, broken brooms and buckets with an inch of dried cement in the bottom.
Contractors throw their stuff here rather than pay to dispose of it properly. I have a small album devoted to its magnetic attraction to urine, deposited in empty water bottles by cabdrivers who don't have time for a pit stop, or splashed directly on the wall by drunks stumbling home from the nearby bars and stadia.
It is a powerfully sad place for a Christmas tree, especially one that hasn't even been given the dignity of a ritual undressing.
I understand that there will be times when you wake up woolly-headed on Dec. 26 and suddenly remember you have a one-way ticket to Dar es Salaam, leaving at 10 a.m. from Dulles International Airport. And it's understandable on these occasions you may have to resort to a merciless Boxing Day defenestration not just of the tree and poinsettias, but the contents of the refrigerator too.
And there are people who find goodbyes so painful, they would prefer to toss the tree than suffer the pain of undressing it of ornament. We live in a disposable society, and with cheap Christmas lights now little more expensive than a large coffee, why bother to save them?
Better to end things with bitter finality than the lingering pain of a sentimental au revoir, just like a human relationship. Out, and don't ever come back. The Christmas tree mirrors our relationship to birth and death: posting pictures of the former on Facebook is obligatory, but never the latter.
But it does seem cruel and wasteful. Not just prodigal with material things, but prodigal of tradition. Un-decorating the tree is excruciating but necessary. The meaning of an ornament is directly tied to its preservation. Better to channel the pain into some kind of ritual. Drink, and ululate, and wrap each bauble for the longer summer hibernation.
But if you must just toss it without so much as a ritual washing of the body ("Oh tree that is born of cone ..."), at least put it in a dark plastic garbage bag, like that body in your trunk.
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