I’d just like to say that Cecil penned an excellent column this week; perhaps the finest ever. It’ll probably end up in the schoolbooks of boys and girls for generations to come.
Also, completely unrelated—not even sure why I’m bringing it up—I’m briefly mentioned in it. (Auntie Em, too, so I hear. Probably a vicious rumor, that.)
Congrats, Skip, on achieving fame and a sort of immortality. However, when people wish you a white Christmas, I’m thinking they don’t mean from spider webs.
Most Christmas horror films tend to focus on the obvious villains: killer snowmen, elfs run amuck, a sorority house serial killer, that Culkin kid.
Those don’t scare me. I’ve learned something since. It’s the living tinsel that gets me these days. So, should you be celebrating or visit the house of someone who does, if you see the tinsel move, run. Fast.
I really enjoyed the article. Even if SkipMagic is in it. 
All kinds of critters in the Christmas trees of America.
The worst thing that ever fell out of a live Christmas tree in the (mumble) years I have had one is: needles. This article panders to the germ-phobes, allergy-phobes, and bug-phobes, WTF? There were two murders and half a dozen assaults on Christmas eve in my city from humans this year, no one attacked by scales or spiders.
I get that a lot. “I enjoyed the car ride, even if Skippy was there.” Or, “That ritual murder went really well, even if Skip had to join along.” Or, “Great life I had. Despite Skippy.”
Grandma was always a kidder.
Did they jump out from Christmas trees?
Murderphobia is another irrational fear based on 1. the fact that murders are easily sensationalised 2. the attribution bias and possibly 3. it feeds into the system of social control where keeping citizens complacent and terrified of their neighbours is an inherently handy thing.
IIRC, one is twice as likely to get killed by a car, three times as likely to die as a result of lack of health insurance and fortyone times as likely to die from heart disease (though there’d be overlap between lack of health insurance in some instances).
Being afraid of having 4000 Praying Mantises in your house is not an irrational fear.
FAKE TREES FOREVER!
Quoth Cecil: “You can of course buy artificial and sidestep such issues, but you can never entirely put out of your mind the knowledge that the classic bristle-and-wire fake tree was originally devised by a manufacturer of toilet bowl brushes.”
In some jursdictions, like the Commonwealth of Virginia, real trees are fire code violations in multi-unit buildings, such as apartments and managed care facilities, unless a sprinkler system is present.
About ten years ago my family bought a real tree for the first time in forever. All was well until around Christmas Eve, when suddenly…
Bugs! Bugs everywhere! On closer inspection, they were tiny praying mantises (manti?). There was a cocoon of praying mantises in the tree, and it hatched. We had hundreds in the living room. Eventually we scooped them all up and moved them outside, and my mother swore off live trees once again.
We had a very large banana slug crawl out of ours. Needless to say, he was given a quick trip to the garden. Mind you, they are sorta cute.
This is indeed a Cecil Classic for all time.
(mantises)
I lived in the Florida Keys for a while, which is the end of the earth as far as Christmas trees go. Hard to find, and pretty dry and scraggly when you can. But we found one, and on Christmas morning a giant scorpion plopped out of it right in the middle of the presents. It was dispatched quickly. It was a local species and more ugly than dangerous, but had obviously found shelter in the tree while on the local lot.
I also talked to a home depot employee in Tampa who complained about small mammals in the tree shipments. They would take the trees out of a semi, and lots of little “mice” would be running around the truck afterward. I think there are some weird species records for some northern mice species in Florida, and I think they were transported in Christmas tree shipments.
Jeff