The Buddhist Theory of Christmas Trees
Buying a Christmas tree is never a quick process, unless your only requirement is getting in and out of the garden centre before you get dragged into the queue for Santa’s grotto. It’s also a process where Buddhist theory comes startlingly to the fore...
There is no other place where the Buddhist theory of life is easier to understand than a garden centre in the first weeks of December. Buddhists believe that the human condition is always to want that little bit more. Man is never content with what he’s got, he has to keep striving for something extra. It’s exactly the same with a Christmas tree.
No matter how good a Christmas tree you choose from the massed forest of firs and spruce awaiting you at the garden centre, you always have that nasty, nagging suspicion that there’s a better one just round the corner that you’ve missed out on. Or that when you get home, you’ll suddenly realise that the all-important fairy-holding spike is a little bit wonky.
Choosing the right Christmas tree is not a task that can be completed in under an hour. A phrase that never occurs in our household is, “we’re just nipping out for the Christmas tree”. You could plan a show garden at Chelsea, and submit it, and get feedback in the time that it takes us to choose the tree we want.
First off there’s the species argument. I love the smell of spruce, it reminds me of childhood; the wife wants a fir. We have a nominal argument about what we should buy this year, spruce or fir, which is a bit like the preparation they have before a Sumo wrestling match. Before the fight the two combatants prowl round the outside of the Dhoyo, then line up as though they were about to grapple, before breaking off and starting the process all over again. It’s a ritual, just as the Spruce vs Fir argument is a ritual. We pose the question, then decide on a fir.
Next up is the equation, height over price. Ideally you want the biggest tree in the price bracket you’re paying for, but you don’t want a tall tree with few branches at the top. Height isn’t everything. That top 50 centimetres is where it can all go wrong. You need to consider so many different variables to factor in when picking a tree. It’s like an exercise in algebra.
You have to factor in ‘bushiness at base’, there’s also the critical ‘straight fairy-holding top’, plus ‘enough bushy bits at the top’ to hang things on as well. ‘Stragglyness’ is to be avoided, ‘symmetry’ is to be applauded, and don’t forget that critical ‘distance between the bottom of the trunk and first branches’measurement which is so easy to miss when you get that rush of enthusiasm that you’ve finally got the right tree. If that’s too small, then you’ll be sawing off branches just to get it into the holder.
And then you need to make sure that the trunk isn’t too big for your Christmas tree holder and you won’t be sawing chunks off that for half an hour in a vain bid to jam it into the holder and not buy a larger size.
In a pioneering bit of algebra here is my formula for the perfect Christmas tree.
Choosing it in the tight confines of massed ranks of Non-drop Nordmans is never easy and in December the light is less that optimal. There is always the chance that some rogue branch appears when you get it home. It’s the one you never saw when you were twirling it through 360 degrees, or 720 degrees, or in our case a minimum of 1440 degrees (while fighting off someone who thought they saw it first).
With all those parameters met, it’s time to get it wrapped up in netting and hauled to the car. And sod’s law being what it is, the moment you get your tree netted up, you will certainly spot the most perfect Christmas tree that ever existed in a really obvious place. And maybe just a little bit cheaper.
In Buddhism the first ‘Noble Truth’ is that life is suffering. The second Noble Truth is that suffering is caused by craving, and always wanting something else. In Garden Grumpism there are no Noble Truths only Noble Firs and the hard truth that after spending an hour choosing a real beauty…it won’t fit in your car.
