Well, I dunno. We have an artificial tree. It sits in a small box in a closet for most of the year, and about the middle of December, it gets assembled. Maybe "only God can make a tree," but when the two section trunk is screwed together and the branches are inserted into the small sockets in the trunk, it stand about four feet tall (we set it on a small library table in our living room, in front of the windows) and it looks like a real tree, unless you bury your face in the branches and start closely examining minute details. It is, by design, sufficiently irregular enough, just like the real thing, that it doesn't have that "plastic tree" look. Most people who see it, even close up, assume that it is real.

We've had it for at least twenty, maybe twenty-five years now. When Christmas is over, maybe on Epiphany (January 6th, the day following "the twelfth day of Christmas") the lights and decorations are removed, the tree is disassembled and stored in its box, and it goes back in the closet until the following Christmas. No clean-up or disposal necessary.

It was a one-time purchase. We don't get a new one every year. Nor do we need to gas up the car and drive out somewhere to buy a tree and haul it back into town (our Toyota doesn't emit a great deal of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, but it does burn gasoline), nor do we have the problem of disposing of the tree when Christmas is over. The glut of tinder-dry Christmas trees is always a royal pain in the butt for the city disposal and recycling services.

As to real trees, we live in the Pacific Northwest. We live on a tree-lined street and we're a couple of blocks south of a large city park full of trees. This area is an absolute paradise for dogs with kidney problems, not to mention a vast population of squirrels. Keeping a live tree in a pot would require maintenance, it would take up space we can ill afford, and it would recycle a relatively minuscule amount of carbon dioxide compared to the huge natural recycle plants (literally!) with which we are surrounded.

So crunching the figures, it would seem that our investment in an artificial tree a couple of decades ago was environmentally pretty sound.

Don Firth