Explain Christmas to a young pine tree

Writing Club 

June 4, 2013

Prompt: Explain Christmas to a young pine tree

Now listen here you half grown sap!  Consider all I have to say before the earth grows cold and flakes begin to fall.  Try not to stand to straight or you’ll reach an early end.  The annual slaughter is coming, you need not fear much this year, mind.   But yer time will come.  Ye be a mite too short and a tad too thin to be taken by the axe this year.  You’ll grow a few more rings before ye need tremble.

Yon Sam over there is a sure fire choice with his full branches and ramrod straight trunk.  That’s what they like to cut.  So proud he is and of what?!  He reached for the sun’s warmth so hard he be too perfect.  I tell ye, he be not too bright.  He should have leaned into the wind more, not drank so much of the sweet summer rain when it fell.  Found a wee birdy or two to build a nest or two amid his branches and spoil a limb or two.  Aye, he’ll reach an early end.

Best to be spritely.  The two leggers won’t point at you and bite and strike at you with their metal-capped sticks.  If ye be a smart sapling, ye think long term.  Don’t take pleasure in the nourishment of the soil.  Let the wind blow and yer branches snap.  Suck up the rain Oh so frugally.  Be sparse in yer needles, throw them down here and there.  Digging yer roots down deep won’t matter two hoots of an owl if yer picked.

Beauty is death.  Me, I be too tall and too crooked, my ugly bark preserved year after year by my twisted trunk.

Should ye get picked, it’s not to fear, ye’ll get a wonderful live funeral.  I heard it’s not an immediate death.  I heard the whispers of it o’er the wind.  They stand ye up without yer roots in a pot of water with metal screws that dig into yer trunk and hang bright bits of glass, gaudy baubles about yer branches as ye slowly dehydrate. 

When yer well roasted by the coloured hot bulbs and yer needles fall one by one, they strip ye down and hauss yer bald body to the curb dejected for collection by the great green metal monster to devour.  From the ashes ye rise and to ashes ye return.