O Christmas tree, I’d stuff you in the green bin. Now sing that, Mariah Carey

December 4, 2025 — 1.51pm

O Christmas tree, how desperately
Do I suddenly wish it was January.
O Christmas tree, how readily
Would I stuff you in the green bin, seriously.

The author’s Christmas tree adorned with gifts and baubles. (Just watch out for the latter – they fall like rocks.)Credit:

There you go, Mariah Carey. Let’s see you take those lyrics and turn them into a new yuletide money-spinner. I, meanwhile, will go back to sulking about the hideous, deteriorating, obnoxious colossus that’s taken up squatter’s rights in my living room, where it will spend the next three weeks being feted by misty-eyed visitors who’ll waltz in, take a noisy snootful of pine tree, and exclaim joyfully that the whole place smells like Christmas.

To which I say the following.

First, Christmas does not smell like anything because Christmas does not have a smell. Second, even if it did, in my house the scent is inevitably accompanied by subtle undertones of eau de profane language from the resident control freak (that would be me) charged with hydrating the base and chasing pine needles out of floorboards.

Third, this notion that the more the tree decays, the better it smells, is a falsehood cooked up by the ghosts of Christmas marketing doo-wop to distract from the fact they’ve successfully charged a premium for a big, withering corpse.

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The irony is, the only thing in our place more hellbent than me on hastening its demise is the tree itself, which starts December a bottle-green behemoth, spends a month in a boiling living room, and ends it as relentlessly brown and spiky as a Grinch’s toenail.

Having said all this, I fully acknowledge that I am a lone voice in the wilderness (read: my house), bleating listlessly about the aesthetic benefits of a glorious artificial alternative. In recent years, the farm my family buys a tree from has instituted an online ticketing system for anyone who wants to tag one in person before it is cut down about a month later. In effect, this means we now join a virtual queue to join an actual queue after driving halfway across Sydney to eyeball our victim ahead of schedule.

And by “ahead of schedule”, I mean “the virtual queue opens in October”, which should preclude all but the most obsessive Christmas crackpots from getting involved. As if. Friends, last year I logged on at the appointed hour and the tickets were all snapped up within nine minutes. I practically emerged with a footprint in my forehead.

“Never again,” I vowed, before schlepping out with my family anyway and then allowing myself to be talked into having a three-metre tree home-delivered, which, at $130, cost roughly the same as the amount we’d spent on toll roads to choose it in the first place.

Uprooted for your festive cheer.Credit: Robert Pearce

And that brings us to the task of decorating the tree. Presumably when God invented pine needles He did not intend for them to support whatever jingly-jangly frippery Myer was spruiking for half price in the Black Friday sales.

Eternal optimists that we (well, some of us) are, we spend a gleeful half-hour painstakingly placing the baubles to ensure even spacing and bragging rights on the family WhatsApp group. It’s right about this point that the tree starts acting like one of those yappy little crossbreed dogs that’s been forced out in public dressed in a tutu and novelty reindeer ears.

“Why have I suddenly turned into a drag queen?” you can hear it wondering (the dog or the tree, it’s all the same). If the dog has any sense, it just chews off the sparkles. The tree’s branches, meanwhile, start sagging and refusing to support the weight of anything heavier than the hand-painted cardboard egg-carton bell my six-year-old is still irrationally attached to four years after he made it.

From my now-traditional vantage point (under the tree, on pine needle patrol with the stick vacuum), I know the jingle bell rocks have started falling seconds after the first bauble hits me in the face. For a while, I play along and hang them back up neatly, but by the middle of the month, I’ve emotionally tapped out, having realised that the special bottle of Christmas tree elixir of youth we impulse-bought at the register actually seems to be hastening the trunk’s demise.

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On the upside, even though it’s frightfully expensive, unfit for purpose and destined to be long gone by the end of the holidays, the alleged nutrient spray smells like pine, which smells like Christmas (except not really), so at least the visitors are happy.

Mostly I just leave them to it. As for me, this year I’m planning to petition Mariah Carey to add a few extra requests to a certain yuletide classic: All I want for Christmas is you. And a plastic tree. And a broom. And a reality check for anyone who thinks pine equals Christmas. And a couple of sturdy removalists. And, finally, a full green bin.

Michelle Cazzulino is a Sydney writer.

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