Mucking About

Tree growers try to stem tide of artificial offerings

Not gonna work with me, folks. I was raised a real-tree devotee, but this weekend was probably the last straw for me--and I didn't even put the tree up or chop it down. Brad and I joined my family on Saturday morning for the annual tree-chopping event; we tried a new place in Harvard, Illinois rather than heading west to Oregon--also in Illinois--as we had in the past. Brad and I drove for an hour and a half to meet my family there, despite the fact that Brad wasn't feeling well, and arrived to find ourselves in a mud pit from which my car will not soon recover. Neither will my shoes, or my coat, which received--along with my face and neck--a nice spittle coating of mud thanks to an errant snowball that bounced in one of the plentiful mud puddles that comprised the path for the horse-drawn carriage that we didn't ride. And we did this for what? So my mother can vacuum pine needles every day for a month, shoo the dogs away from the tree, and crane her neck to water it every day? She may be willing to make these efforts, and to put up with the post-decorating rash that inevitably accompanies decorating a real tree, but I'm not. In any case, we ended up going home after the sawing was done because Brad still wasn't feeling well, so I don't know how the tree looks now. But I know this: I felt bad about missing a chance to have my mom's pasta, but not so much about missing the chance to mess with a pine tree for a few hours. My fake tree at home looks just fine to me; it's been up a week and a half and thus far not a needle has fallen.

We did watch a good movie while Brad was recuperating, and I'll pass along my recommendation now rather than writing a real review because, though we rented it from Netflix, it's on HBO tonight at 6:00. Shattered Glass is excellent. It deals with the fall of Stephen Glass, a journalist whose articles for several magazines were all the rage until someone discovered the truth about how he got such great quotes from his sources. It's marvelously acted; you can't ask for a better trio than Hank Azaria, Peter Sarsgaard, and Hayden Christiansen. OK, you can. But this movie is still worth watching. It's on HBO at 6 PM Central, or you can catch it at 9 on the Pacific version of the channel. Let me know if you end up watching!