Dedicated to Harold Roland Swardson, who loved France and all things French.
This story starts with clueless expats, but it doesn’t end there.
When we moved to France in 1996, we brought all our household effects, including a Christmas-tree stand. It wasn’t exactly like this one:
Photo: Christine Swardson Olver
But the technology was similar. You put water into the stand, stick the tree in there and screw it tight.
However, that is not how Christmas trees are supported in France. Here, they are sold with their wooden stands nailed right on them, like this:
It should have been pretty obvious what to do: Buy the Parisian tree, drag it home and put it on the floor. But for several years we instead sawed off the wooden stand, with great effort, and stuck the tree into our American, watery one.
We didn’t have a proper saw, so the tree was uneven at the base and wouldn’t stand straight.
After a couple of years, we realized we could just do it like everyone else and use the stand the tree came with. What we hadn’t estimated was how fast it would dry out. We tended to keep our trees for several weeks after Christmas, as one can when it is properly moist and one can’t summon the energy to remove the decorations. But by the time we were ready, there were more needles on the ground than on the tree.
This is a problem if you live in an apartment building with a shared spaces. No matter how hard I tried to clean up, there were always a few needles lying around the halls and elevator, and believe me, the residents knew exactly who had spewed them.
One year we even tried tying the tree to a long cord and lowering it to the courtyard through the window. From the 4th floor. But the cord wasn’t long enough. So we literally tossed it. The courtyard was covered in needles.
In recent years, the city of Paris has saved us. You can now buy a compostable plastic bag that you put under your tree before you decorate it.
True, it doesn’t stop needle accumulation. But you can sweep them onto the bag, then lift the bag over the entire tree and take it outside for garbage collection, with little spillage. Even better, there are services that provide a live tree, which they take away after Christmas.
You also can dispose of Christmas trees at recycling centers in many parks. There was already one sad little discard in the Parc Monceau on Christmas morning. (The sign says, “After the holidays, your tree deserves a second life.”)
As it happens, a Paris Christmas tree was what got me into my first Twitter war. A few weeks ago, I took a photo of a decorated tree on a city sidewalk next to the public transit station, and tweeted it. The idea was to imply hypocrisy on the part of the government, which adheres to the idea that France is a strictly secular state. A fuss between the British and American press on the one hand and the French government and some press on the other has been raging over precisely this point.
The Anglo-American press, as it is called here, has raised questions about whether the government’s crackdown on Muslim associations and mosques after a terrible spate of terror attacks includes elements of discrimination against one religion. The French response: You don’t understand that “laïcité,” the broad term for secularism, is a crucial underpinning of our society. We treat everyone the same. Except, the other side points out, when you don’t.
That’s heavy stuff. All I was trying to do was raise the question over whether a truly secular society puts a Christmas tree in a public space. Is a Christmas tree a religious symbol? It’s a fair question and I expected some disagreement in the public forum.
What I hadn’t counted on was to be called both an anti-Semite and an Islamophobe, to be told I should “shut up,” that I was exhibiting “dirty ignorance,” and worse. One person sent me a horrible message on Facebook Messenger, which I only use for personal communication; another posted threatening comments on an entirely different tweet, about my previous blog post. (Both were reported and the Twitter account of the person who attacked my post was suspended.)
I know this happens all the time, to lots of people. And many of the hundreds of commenters agreed with my view. But it was my first direct exposure to the Twitter equivalent of Ebenezer Scrooge, and it wasn’t fun. That’s one of many, many reasons that I join those who are hoping for a happier 2021.