The January Plot

I don't know when it happened, but I have now passed that period where having a brightly-decorated evergreen plant in the corner of the room was cheerful and seasonal and arrived at the point where I wake up in the morning and wonder why the hell there is a dead tree in the house. What seemed like a brilliant idea on December 24th now looks like a symptom of mental illness.

As with many things in life, there is a considerable gap between deciding to do something and actually doing it. In this case the gap is prolonged because taking the Christmas tree down is one of the worst household jobs. It's depressing, offers more opportunities to get scratched and pricked than bathing a cat and creates an awful mess that is all the more annoying because you know you deliberately created the whole problem for yourself a few weeks earlier. The gaudy accoutrements will have to be hidden away in a box at the back of a cupboard like a guilty secret. Why do we spent 11 months of the year agonising over the choice of stylish and sophisticated clothing, sofas and food mixers, and then dress our Christmas trees is if they were drunken transvestites?

The covert homicide metaphor becomes ever more fitting when it comes to disposing of the tree corpse. You wake up one morning to find the streets look like a mafia war has broken out in Christmas land. The bodies, half bald and with broken limbs, lie on pavements or street corners, alone or in little groups, as if they have been the victims of drive-by shootings or tossed from speeding cars as a warning to others.

There are always some people who prefer to pretend their tree is still alive and will be restored to full health by being planted in the garden or in an empty paint tin on the balcony. This has never worked in the history of Christmas and is the equivalent of propping a corpse in the corner of Tesco with a shopping bag in its hand and hoping no one will notice.

Most of us are more civilised, but that doesn't make the disposal problem easier. A lot of buildings discourage residents from throwing their dead Christmas trees into the communal rubbish bins, for the simple reason that these are designed to cope with potato peelings and empty Cif bottles rather than several acres of coniferous forest.

It's clear that I'm going to have to dismember the tree in the apartment, like an amateur psychopath with a hacksaw. I can then wrap the butchered pieces in plastic bags and secretly transport them down to the rubbish bins over the course of the next few weeks. I’m going to have to be extra careful to pick up every needle from under the sofa and scrub every spot of spilled sap with bleach. Then there’s just the problem of witnesses…

Jamie Stokes