Nothing Is As It Seems

I wanted to go to a tree farm this year and cut down our very own live Christmas tree.  The idea in my head was all sorts of amazing.  When we arrived we took a little hayride out to the trees and were then given a saw.  After thoroughly scouring the area, we found the perfect tree to take home.  But then Shawn discovered something laying in a hole in the ground.  It was a spike.  Then he noticed all the trees had a small hole dug around them.  Shawn clued in that something was a little suspicious, so he began turning the tree we had picked.  It easily spun around in the ground.  That’s when Shawn said to me, “These trees have already been cut!”  Sure enough, a hole had been drilled into the bottom of them, and all you had to do was simply lift it off its spike that it was set on.  It felt like such a fake experience.  Shawn described it like the movie The Truman Show, nothing is as it seems.  I couldn’t bring myself to kneel down and cut a tree that you could simply lift out of the ground, even though so many other people were carrying around their saws and cutting away.   I felt like the other nations across the ocean were watching us Americans through some powerful telescope, laughing at how ridiculous we Americans looked cutting down trees that were already cut and thinking we are all ridiculous idiots!  Ha!  Well, we may not have gotten the experience I was hoping for, BUT Santa was there, funnel cakes, hot chocolate, and it was beautiful!