Things I tripped over on my way to the internet

via hilker & davereed:

Please, save the life of a tree, and find a dealer of live Christmas trees in your area. The tree comes in a planter, can keep in the house up to a week before Christmas. You can decorate it like normal, then, on December 26, simply move it to the back porch. The tree will survive in the planter for several years, so you can bring it back indoors for the next two Christmases, and then you simply plant it in your yard where it will live out its days.

I don’t understand this at all. We went to an area called Apple Hill last weekend—along with hundreds of other people—and brought back a Christmas tree that we cut down ourselves at a Christmas tree farm. This is one of the best parts of the holidays and one of the best days of the year.

Many hundreds of people have been going to this same area for many dozens of years and doing the same thing, year after year. And yet there is no shortage of Christmas trees anywhere in the State of California. It’s almost as if they are some kind of renewable resource.

This argument is like saying you should raise your own cows and chickens so you can enjoy many years of them as pets before you enjoy them as food. And somehow this would save the life of something that would not have existed if it was not raised for the express purpose of being used. Or something.