I’ve already written a few posts this year wondering if I’ve seen the last discarded trees, but we cut down so many, it takes this long to discard them all. We could have left them standing.

It’s almost April and people pay to chop down so many trees, I’ve seen them thrown out this month. I think I’ve seen the last for the season so I’ll post the last images of them. I’ll copy text from previous posts so people see I’m defending, not attacking, tradition. It’s sad how garbage-y they look. This long after Christmas, I think people have lost interest in connecting the trees with life.

Anyway, the text for context:

Every year, I take pictures of how people trash their trees. I find the waste and death tragic and the images of something that was supposed to celebrate life become garbage. This season, I started seeing trees trashed before Christmas: Ten days before Christmas people are already throwing away their Christmas pagan trees.

I call them “Christmas pagan trees” because, as I’ve written before, people in the U.S. celebrate Jesus’s birth with ritual of pagan origin. They celebrate something that happened in Bethlehem with chopping down fir trees. This tradition seems to have begun in northern Europe, not the middle east.

I propose instead of celebrating birth with death and mixing paganism in with Christianity, recognizing that cutting down trees was not likely ever appropriate, but not now.

• Are Christmas Trees Pagan? Inside The Origins Of The Evergreen Tradition
• Ancient History Of The Christmas Tree And Its Pagan Roots – How The ‘Forbidden’ Tree Survived Against All Odds
• History of the Christmas Tree: Pagan Origins

Look at this mess. We don’t have to keep trashing the environment just because we used to. Can you show your love for your savior in more life-affirming ways? You don’t need a dead tree to spend time with family.

This tradition once started. We can start new ones—life-affirming ones. Here is what will happen to your tree within a month if you buy one. Can you think of something better?

And now, the late-season, dead, trashed Christmas pagan trees

Do the images make you proud to be an American, or a Christian, if you’re either?

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• ← More on Eric Williams’s “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery”