nice! :D

I always love giving people what they want most. :3

i have not had to do this in years so i am out of practice though i have a lot of penpal stuff i do XD it's a bit like that only with less postage and more guessing

you don't usually get presents for your family?

i dont really celebrate that holiday. i am neither a christian or a sun-worshiper so the 25th of december is just another day XD

ahhh

I'm not religious at all, but my family is, and even if they weren't, Christmas is fun to celebrate as a secular holiday.

and i am celebrating it now XD she is religious but it is being kept secular(though my tree has been converted to an xmas one so that was a bit of an argument) oh well X''D better than bringing a tree corpse in!

Tree corpses are lined up as decorations on my way to school. I think there's at least four of them. They're all pine tress without the stump, held up by metal wires. Each has yellow lights that only show at night. No ornaments though--ornaments are probably too expensive for public decoration xD

it's pretty aweful tho' ;x; i like plants and seeing them killed like that is messed up, trees are not like flowers and grasses, they generally dont grow back

Mm, I remember walking one day and thinking "Wow,if they do this every year isn't this how forests get destroyed? Maybe the Christmas tree tradition originated from the colonial times when people were encouraged to deforest everything to make room for 'development'"

it's a german thing i think XD

my mother-in-law says there are whole farms just for growing trees to kill

Whaa, farms just for that? I mean, I guess you need a supply of Christmas trees especially since there are so many people in need of Christmas trees, b-but farms for pine trees for Christmas owo

Edit: Okay, apparently Christmas tree farms are a thing for people ordering Christmas trees. http://www.pickyourownchristmastree.org/NYxmastrees.php "Choose-and-cut-your-own Christmas tree farms, a choose-and-THEY-cut, or a pre-cut Christmas Tree lot"

=_____=;;; gross stuff


of course we do worse to chickens

...chickens are plentiful and abundant like grass and flowers though. But I guess you mean the chicken farms where they can't even move around and do normal chicken things?

yeah where they are in cages that are just a little bigger than their bodies and their beaks are removed x____x;;;

Whaa- Their beaks get removed? What good reason is there for that? How do they eat?

the beaks are removed so they do not gouge out their neighbors or outright kill them(like all creatures chickens go insane if they are too crowded). they are fed through troughs so with the stubby bits left over

Apparently when they are chicks and shoved into cages like that they have a tendency to attack each other to the point of death for 'survival of the fittest'.

nah, Christmas trees are usually grown on farms specifically for growing Christmas trees, so it doesn't usually affect forest development.

you see a lot of Christmas tree farms here in Washington, where the climate is just perfect for growing evergreens.

damn, chocobo is better at sayin' stuff than I am.

X''D all i did was complain, though!

I actually prefer real trees, but lately my parents have switched to using fake ones.

well shoot XD i guess i am going to bitch a whooooole lot more, hahahaha

haha, why?

there's no need to bitch.

Most of the "we are losing our forests" deforestation is for cattle farming and the like. That's one reason to reduce your beef intake. They use slash and burn techniques. (Note: much of this is encouraged outside of the USA as a quick and cheap way to try to grow developing country economies...it doesn't work as old forests don't have the soil for farming...which invites some intentional western exploitation)

I wouldn't say the tree farms are as bad as you make them out to be. For one thing, the trees used are rather short lived. Also, artificial trees are more of a concern due to their effect greenhouse gass-wise. While some use recycled materials, the effect per pound is still greater than for normal tree use.

Alternatives would include designing homes that had a central area for a growing tree, or even creating a woodpile for animals and other plants to use.

Christmas trees are grown specifically for harvesting, and they're always replanted. It's much more responsible, and much more environmentally-friendly than petrochemical artificial trees.

they are killing something so it can be looked at for a couple weeks then thrown away. that is pretty aweful x_____x

i like the idea of either getting rid of the tree(which would also reduce the plastic production in ornamentation) or encourage, like you said, natural tree use(though in the form of potted plants since many persons have no yards or houses)

it's just a tree...not sure why it's so awful to kill a plant. o.o

because it is a living thing and, while it is not capable of higher thinking it can feel pain which is plenty reason enough to not kill them and it's not practical to kill local flora and fauna just to make plants whose sole purpose is decoration for a brief amount of time

um...

trees cannot feel pain.

they actually can, many even emit chemical distress signals when they or a nearby plant of the same species is cut. this is something we have known for close to 70 years

uh, no, they cannot. Plants don't have a nervous system; they can't feel anything, let alone pain. Emitting chemical signals is hardly the same thing.

...sigh...
Conflict of moral ideals here. Can't agree with chocobo.
I can agree that there are better means - I can't that those means are in artificial trees.

Galla's argument I can understand more.

many creatures lack nerves and can still not only feel pain but react to pain stimulus. you seriously need to pick up a book(i assume you are a kid though, this is stuff they teach in highschool)

because i am for not having trees or because i am encouraging the use of potted plants instead of cutting trees?

I'd rather have a fake tree and not have to deal with the sap... not to mention finding needles for WEEKS after it gets tossed to the curb. I have a little white fake tree that takes a couple minutes, tops, to get set up and situated, because it's one of those pre-lit ones. We have two cats here, and a black thumb who manages to kill pretty much any plant in a pot or have it be brought to a sorry state within weeks, despite doing her best to take care of it (Love mom, but really, it's a miracle we have any potted plants inside the house.), so an artificial tree's the best solution for our family.

wow, galla was not kidding about the complaining thing XD


but yeah, though to be fair there have also been studies done that creatures that previously were thought to feel pain do not, creatures like butterflies do not feel pain while grass feels it acutely. nature is seriously crazy XD