Felons are Barking up
the Wrong Tree
The good news is, German police have created a special task force to deal with these tree thieves, whom they’re calling the “Christmas Tree Mafia.” The nickname sounds a little extreme, but who knows; maybe come Jan. 2 these particular criminals encase their trees in cement and throw them in the Rhine. (Regardless, it’s a safe bet there’s more than one German cop who’s thinking, “I spent four years at Heidelberg for this?”)
I bring this up because I’m particularly sensitive about Christmas trees these days; I have kids now, which makes the whole Christmas tree selection process a significant event. As opposed to before I had kids, when my wife and I picked our tree off a fence outside Ann & Hope and shoved it in the back seat of my Chevy Cavalier — it was like something out of a Currier and Ives print, if Currier and Ives had both actually been named “Earl.”
And then there’s the decorating. This year my 3-year-old daughter took complete control of the process, like Martha Stewart attacking a bare foyer. This resulted in several phenomena not as common in households without young children:
· A world-class collection of broken bulbs;
· Prominent placement of decorations shaped like Disney princesses;
· A marked proliferation of ornaments on branches less than three feet from the floor.
This last development proved particularly problematic, given that my 16-month-old son decided to make it his life’s work to defoliate those same branches as quickly as possible, and, in a fit of post-Y2K preparedness, to store whatever salvage he could collect behind the couch. I’m not sure, but I think he may have Spam and bottled water behind there too.
What I’m getting at, though, is that Christmas trees bring a family together — at least after you sweep up the broken bulbs to keep them from getting lodged in your feet — which makes Christmas tree-related crime all the more disturbing.
And not just in Germany. Take for instance the recent incident in Norway, where Magne Furuholmen, a member of the band A-Ha, was given 14,0000 kroner to decorate a public tree. Rather than buy ornaments, Furuholmen simply hung the money on the tree, at which point it was promptly stolen. It’s this business savvy that explains why the rest of the world hasn’t heard from A-Ha since 1985.
Thankfully, there are no such shenanigans in America. I know for a fact that you won’t find kroner on the tree in the White House, for instance, where George and Laura Bush have instead been spotted lovingly covering their spruce with little papier mache doggies (a far cry from the days when tree decorating there consisted primarily of Hillary poking Bill with a plastic icicle).
They even mounted a camera on the collar of their dog, Barney, to give visitors to the White House Web site a “dog’s-eye tour” of the tree, and presumably to preserve homeland security via secret doggie wiretapping.
Say … maybe those German cops looking for stolen trees should try that. Or they may want to just consider checking behind my couch.