Is there a bigger racket our there than the cash transactions which happened up and down the street of NYC? I'm not talking about the sale of illicit drugs, underground gambling parlors or houses of ill refute but rather the sale of Christmas trees during the holiday season. I went this weekend with my family to pick one out and was floored when they told me the price. Now they justified it by telling us these were Canadian Douglas Firs cut out of the ground earlier in the week and transported in hyper-sensitive oxygen chambers to ensure freshness, grown with organic fertilizer and fed only the finest spring water from deep in the mountains of Maine to ensure the richest color, strongest branches and longest life.
A $120 later, I got a 10 foot tree tied to the roof of my hybrid truck as I'm barreling back home with Christmas carols blaring and everybody in great spirits. Now it wasn't until I got home and put the tree up that I got a sick feeling in my stomach. Not only did my prized organically grown tree look like the turkey in National Lampoons Christmas Vacation which meant I had more pine-needles on my floor than on my tree within 3 hours but the thing is shaped like John Wayne Bobbitt's Frankenpenis all lumpy on one side.
Then I ask a buddy how much a tree should cost and he tells me that he doesn't spend more than $40 Now I knew this should have been the kind of transaction I should have tried to negotiate but I was thinking it could have only yielded $20 in return and as it was meant to be a nice holiday experience with my 1 year old daughter I didn't want to have to pull myself into that haggling situation. See I can't haggle half-assed. I have to go at it will full gusto which involves huffing and puffing, threatening to walk away and basically increasing my blood pressure by 100 points. So here I stand looking over my half-dead tree with needles which disappear as quickly as my buddy Chin's hairline, branches so weak they make the Christmas Balls look like my own low-hanging sack and a weak smell which can't possibly cover up my JD baptism.
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