Somehow I knew it. I knew that someone, somewhere, would solve the whole tree stand issue.
The problem is obvious enough. Nature did not intend for the top 10 feet of a tree to be hacked off and stuck inside living rooms for a few weeks a year and hence nature did not provide technology to make this possible.
No man appeared to have provided for it either. Every year it is the same nonsense, struggling with some tin contraption that bends this way and that and screwing those stupid screws until they bore deep inside the tree and you stand it up and the tree tips over anyway.
Just when you think you have it right, one too many ornaments on one side causes the whole thing to crash and some beloved ornament to shatter into tiny pieces as tree water muck pours all over the oriental rug.
Why do we do this? I’m slightly drawn to my mother’s solution. She has a closet in her house that is designated the Tree Closet. It contains an artificial tree, already decorated. She opens the door to the closet twice per year, pulling the tree out and then putting it back in.
In any case, we seem to live in an age of innovation, even given the government’s war on all things innovated and even given the government propensity to tax away all the entrepreneurial profits that accrue to the successful marketing of these innovations.
Still the innovation persists, in almost every area of life, and so I suspected regarding Christmas trees. So, given my hunch, I hopped over to the Home Depot and found my dream: an actual functioning, sturdy, lifetime guaranteed, workable, beautiful, easy-to-use Christmas tree stand. You can perhaps see how it works by looking at this picture. It is a steel bucket with a sturdy foundation. And get this: it is called Santa’s Last Stand. How’s that for American ingenuity!
A quick google shows that this stand is certainly the thing. It is being called a “marriage saver.” It is made by Lewis Tools, a garden tool company. You can watch the head of the company making a home video here, and also observe how he doesn’t seem to know how to post the embed link so that his video can go viral.
Who in government would have ever come up with something like this? Who in Congress? Who in those allegedly pro-consumer bureaucracies?
Do we need a system that permits people to do this kind of innovation and market it to you and me? Yeah, I think so. Say what you will about the commodification of Christmas, but in the end, a happy Christmas spirit is profoundly affected by the things in the material world that make it happen. That requires tradition, yes, but not if the tradition is frustrating and terrible. Innovation is also essential to giving life and energy to tradition precisely so that it can continue.
So thank you Mr. Lewis. For now, I won’t go the route of the designated closet.
