We’re officially not getting a Christmas tree! Woo hoo! I feel like I won. I don’t know why, possibly because I’m the likely candidate for the poor schmuck who would have to figure out where to store the thing in the off-season. You see, real trees don’t exist in China. Well, they might exist somewhere, seeing as China’s a really big country and has tigers and monkeys, both of which I associate as being tree-related, probably in no small part thanks to the Disney version of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book,” which actually takes place in India. But you know, I’m American, and Americans are fat and geographically stupid, so India and China might as well be two words for the same country in my vocabulary (and if any Chinese person read that, I’d probably be lynched).
However, what I am quite sure of is that China doesn’t have Christmas tree farms or pretty much anything with genuine pine needles. They don’t even have artificial pine smell in a bottle! Instead, they have plastic. It’s absolutely amazing what they can make out of plastic here. Those glass balls you hang on your tree? Here they’re plastic. The tree? Plastic. Pine cones? They even have those in plastic here. There’s so much plastic, and so many different kinds of plastic, that in a weird twist of events, Christmas tree shopping here is an awful lot like Christmas tree shopping back home.
Over the weekend, Christian and I stumbled upon the Christmas tree center of Dalian. Store upon store lined the street, overflowing with Christmas trees. The trees represented any type you can imagine. There were big, bushy branches, scrawny “Charlie Brown’s Christmas” style branches, random combinations of the above, with and without fake snow. Each tree was as unique from all the others as its genuine cousin would have been. Some were cheap, some were exquisite. All were plastic.
Christian and I, of course, preferred very different styles when it came to the perfect tree. My trees were either too tall or too short. His tree branches were usually too scrawny. We did finally come to a compromise on a fake-snow-covered tree with the lights pre-attached (really, it was a lot better than it sounds), but still decided to take a day to think about it.
And after all that thought, we’ve decided to forgo the plastic. Christian prefers sacrificing the genuine article, and I don’t want a tree lying around the apartment once I get the place organized (though I might reconsider if Christian agreed to the pink tree). So no tree for the next two or three years.
That being said, if your taste runs in plastic, China is Da Bomb.