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University of Toronto's Student Newspaper Since 1880

The ACME Anvil

By Brookes Merritt
Published: 9:00 am, 6 January 2004
Modified: 5 pm, 11 January 2012
under
UPDATED

This week’s Anvil gets dropped on the tree-hugging holiday philanthropists who step out of their toasty-warm, fossil-fueled homes just long enough to chastise others for buying real Christmas trees.

Every winter, environmental wackos cry out and insist that every type of Christmas tree be placed on the Endangered Species list, far and above the African White Rhino.

Where the hell do you come from that you think the perfectly full, exactly 8, 9, or 10 foot tall trees at Home Depot actually grow like that in a forest?

The news flash for you ignoramuses is a concept called tree-farming. Christmas trees are grown on private property-just like the junipers and apple trees in your bloody front yard. They are grown, so that they can be cut down and sold.

If you seriously believe that “the man” is clear-cutting the Canadian Rockies to supply an insatiable 30-day demand for Christmas trees-then you could not possibly fathom a concept as rudimentary as the domestic lumber industry. If this is a strange and foreign concept to you, I recommend you unwrap your arms from around that tree, take your head out of your ass, and wipe the shit from your eyes.

Then again, maybe it’s just me.

Who am I to judge if you sleep better at night knowing that you are helping fund an industry that enslaves umpteen thousand children? Children whose tiny fingers are perfectly suited to fake tree assembly sweatshop work, and whose little lungs gulp down endless toxic vapours of green plastic as it’s molded into the “environmental” excuse of a plastic stick that you like to buy in place of a real Christmas tree.

After all, it’s all about protecting the environment isn’t it? It’s just a coincidental perk that you save a few bucks not having to buy a new tree every season.

The ACME Anvil is a weekly rant addressed to those who should be clobbered over the head with an anvil and left to die in the ditch on the side of an abandoned road.