The Revenge of the Christmas Tree

 

There was a strange exotic spicy scent in the air when we got back home; a scent that tantalised and teased like faint incense from an Eastern temple.

The Christmas tree had been in the corner since the end of November. Its branches were now curling down, and its pine needles had lost their fat flashy shape and rich green colour and had instead become thin and pale.

I stripped it of its baubles and unwound the lights from its emaciated branches. It’s a terrible moment when a Christmas tree is left stripped and naked in the room.

Christmas trees though never leave without a fight.

I lifted it from the bucket, catching a whiff of that strange scent again, and then began to carry it outside. At every doorway its outstretched branches defiantly stretched out grabbing whatever it could.

There’s that awful sound when you hear pine needles showering to the ground and you know you are losing the battle.

Eventually, it's outside at the bottom of the garden looking cheated and betrayed.

Inside the house, there are desiccated pine needles pooling like green blood at the bottom of door frames. They are the rearguard army and have a fighting tactics of their own.

They flitter up the vacuum cleaner hose pipe with a wonderful beguiling sound; but within seconds they have netted together and blocked the hose.

The vacuum begins to overheat, and there’s nothing else to do except to spend the next two hours dissecting the vacuum cleaner, poking into its innards, in an attempt to loosen the stuffed net of pine needles.

There are now pine needles everywhere. They are needling me through my socks, and somehow they are now trailing down the stairs.

The last are eventually swept up, but the hidden ones have now changed tactics: they are now mounting a guerrilla campaign waiting for their moment.

I cook a pizza, slice and serve it up, and the Teenager comments on the pine needle that has somehow managed to lay down in the very centre of the plate like a martyr.

I know that from now on, for months, pine needles will sneak up and needle me.

The Christmas tree left a huge gap in the living room, and every time we open the door and see blank walls instead of colourful lights in the corner, we feel sad.

In an attempt to bring light, warmth and excitement back into our lives we prepare for our traditional ceremony. I march down to the bottom of the garden and light a fire under the tree. It catches alight very quickly. There is an amazing whoosh of fire that races high into the sky. The wind catches it and blows a jet of tumbling flame across both my garden and that of my neighbour's. It is an astonishing, frightening and awe inspiring sight.

Within seconds, it is all over and the flames die down; though I’m left with the chilling thought of what would have happened to us if something like that had happened inside the house.

There’s just the bucket left to carry out. That’s when I realise just where the strange exotic smell was coming from. What was once crystal clean water in the bucket is now a putrid green evil smelling liquid: an effluence of indescribable nastiness.

What I thought was a tantalising scent of Eastern promise was instead an evil glutinous liquid created by the Christmas tree.

And without the Christmas tree's branches and pine needles to filter it, I’m floored by this putrid smell, in this, the final act of revenge, of the Christmas tree.