I Bought a Dead Christmas Tree

(James 2:17-20)

I ventured into Lowes home improvement store Saturday and saw lots of Christmas trees. As I looked around, I noted that there are about three options for the Christmas tree:

1. Lowes had small living potted evergreen trees, about 3.5 feet high. I think this is a good idea… in a way. You wouldn’t be able to hang a lot of ornaments on it and it would probably look a bit like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree sitting in your living room… but at least you could plant it in the yard when spring comes and have something to show for your money.

We love evergreens. Here is a picture of my husband John in our front yard. Perhaps you can see the three spruce trees there. We planted all of them the year we moved in – they were each about 24 inches high. What a wonder to watch them grow. We realize that eventually we will have to remove two of them because of space considerations in lieu of their future massive size .

What we see is fed by what we don’t see, the root system of the tree. I read once that the height of the tree is matched by the depth of the roots. IOW, as high as the tree is above the ground, it is just as deep as that below the ground with its root system. The roots aren’t seen, but they are the lifeline of the tree. A tree can’t live for long once it is cut off from the roots and the soil can no longer feed it.

2. Lowe’s doesn’t sell “fresh-cut” Christmas trees.

3. They also sell dead Christmas trees in boxes. These trees are made of plastic and metal and you put them together like some sort of paint-by-numbers puzzle. They last for years! They never need to be watered and they don’t lose their needles. What an invention! I can certainly see an advantage to them. I even bought one for our home, but I must admit, there are some definite drawbacks to the dead Christmas tree. They require a larger initial investment than the first two options. You don’t have the tradition of going out to the farm and cutting the tree in the night air under the moonlight with your family. Most unfortunately, they don’t have the nice aroma of the fresh-cut trees that we had in our home when I grew up. I suppose it’s because… they’re dead Christmas trees.

Alright, you’re probably seeing through my chatter. These trees really aren’t dead. They’re FAKE!

Dead trees are altogether different animals than fake trees.

Let's think about how a tree gets to this state of being a dead Christmas tree. A “fresh-cut” tree is always on its way to becoming a dead Christmas tree. A “fresh-cut” tree has no way of receiving the necessary nutrients and so it withers and dies in relatively short period of time. A fake Christmas tree, however, really isn’t a tree at all, so to call it dead is putting it in the wrong category altogether. Wasn’t that silly for me to say I bought a dead Christmas tree in a box? Of course it was.

On the flip side (and more to the point of my underlying thoughts this weekend), to call a dead tree a fake tree would be a terrible misnomer as well. A dead tree really is a tree. It was once living but as it continues in its cut-off or diseased or starved or thirsty state, it becomes unrecognizable as a tree. But it was a real, living tree... because that is the only way it could find its way to being a real, dead tree! It was alive and then it ceased to be lively. It was never a fake tree! It really and truly is a tree, but sadly, it’s a dead tree.

Fake and dead are not the same at all.