Who is the Holiday Lorax?
Who speaks for the xmas trees?
Salutations from the land of paper detritus!
Hope everyone had a fine holiday (whatever your weather) and spent some days gathering with some subset of family and friends that make you happy.
Me, I am pondering trees… in NYC the weeks after Christmas are marked, not with boxes, but with seemingly infinite piles of very fresh-looking spruce and blue fir that someone spent $100-$250 on (live trees go for about forty bucks a foot in NYC). Don’t worry, says the City, it all gets mulched.
Why are we still chopping enormous old-growth trees for holiday decorations in public spaces? I get it if someone wants a real tree in their home - there’s the scent and an acceptance of flaws; a love of reality gets engaged, not to mention the tradition of going to get the tree, whether bought or self-hatcheted in some less-expensive suburb where the trees are grown for your chopping pleasure. Plus, live trees give you many opportunities to teach smaller humans how to use a dustpan.
But for public spaces—why? It is harder to stabilize a real tree. Harder to decorate it. Much harder to originally find it, and it takes a minimum of 25 years of care to replace it in nature (if you have read Overstory by Richard Powers, you know it probably is much more complicated than that.)
So - why not hold an annual contest for artists to design trees in various public spaces like they do in Lithuania? Here’s an article discussing the incredible light-and-mirrors fabulous Christmas Trees that have decorated Vilnius town square since 2015 — and not a single dead tree among them.
WRITING
This week was slow but fun - my New Years tradition was chosen as a keystone of Mutha Magazine’s “Ask a Mutha” New Year’s Hopes article. It will probably raise more questions than it answers, but here’s the article. And here are the answers. Yes: we did it again this year. Yes: it was terrific. Yes: we will do it again next year for year 40. That’s XL, for those of you who read Roman numerals. It’s gonna be huge!
Been sending out stuff and applying for things. I’ll let you know how that goes.
I also wrote a review of ChatGPT—well, not a review so much as an interview with this tricky little AI who is very likely to render all of our jobs meaningless… read it here.
RANDOM FINAL THOUGHT
I read an article in Rolling Stone about an author who staged her own suicide on Facebook when what she really wanted to to take a break from social media. Leaving aside the complete insanity of elaborately staging your own death—and continuing to monitor the process—instead of just having the willpower to delete an app, my takeaway was not that she was horrible for traumatizing all these people who just wanted to be nice to her, but that this Facebook group banded together in solidarity to promote this presumed-dead woman’s work and sell all her back-copies.
It would be great if people would read each other’s stuff and help each other sell things BEFORE the deaths of their friends. Funeral arrangements are super expensive: feel free instead to take me out to lunch while I’m still alive.
great tree idea!