I was in the car park next to the brewery. There was a pile of Christmas trees. Hundreds - you couldn’t really count them. Now that they had come to the end of their usefulness, two guys in helmets were stuffing them into a wood-chipper.
Each tree took about ten seconds to chip. It went in one end, the sawn-off part of the trunk first, and came out as a shower of chips. The trees looked pretty big compared with the chips. The chips looked like nothing.
I thought of the day we got our tree. It was three weeks ago. We drove up to a place near Halland. The car park was full. Again, there were hundreds of trees, but they weren’t exactly in a pile - they were arranged according to size and price. Some were nicer than others.
When you got your tree, you put it through a bagging machine, sawn-off part first. Each tree took about ten seconds to bag. Bagged, the trees looked a lot smaller than unbagged. That way, they were easier to get into your car.
At the time, I briefly thought of the environment. All the electric saws, the bagging machine, the bags made from plastic netting. All the car journeys, the decorations, the flashing lights. And then I put the thought out of my mind.
In the car park, I had the thought again. The environment, I thought. The truck journeys, the chipping machines. I watched as the pile got slowly smaller. One of the trees in the pile looked different from the others. It hadn’t even made it out of the bag.