Christmas tree, from Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon Days":
"The tree enters a few days before Christmas, a fresh one bought from Mr. Fjerde or Mr. Munch, two adjoining bachelor farmers ... . Mr. Munch will talk your ear off, and to hear him tell it, he never meant to raise Christmas trees, they simply snuck into his property one day, and if he ever has the time he'll clean them out with a backhoe. 'They grow like goddam weeds, you know,' he says, 'and they eat the hell out of your soil ... . Goddam, I think next spring I maybe oughta get in there with some herbicide. ... Or I could burn them.'
"Mother can't bear swearing, so she sits in the car with the windows rolled up and a choir singing on the radio. 'You stay here,' she tells me, but I go with Dad up to Mr. Munch's back door for the thrill of it. Bachelor farmers disobey just about every rule my parents laid down; the yard is full of junk under the snow ... . A hill of old tin cans sits about a can's throw from the back door. Mr. Munch is unshaven ... his clothes are dirty, brown juice runs down his chin, his breath smells of liquor. 'He's not fit to live with decent people,' my mother told me when I asked why he lived alone. And yet he seems to have gotten away with it; he is as old as my grandpa.
"He ducks into his little house to get two dollars' change ... and I see he does not clean his room either. He carefully counts out the two dollars into Dad's hand and says, 'You be careful with that tree now. Those things are like explosives, you know. I sold these people a tree, I think it was last year, and two days later they was all dead. It blew up one night and burned them all so you couldn't tell one from the other. I tell you I wouldn't have one if you paid me. Even fresh -- they can go off like a bomb, you know. Boom! Just like that.' 'Merry Christmas,' Dad said. 'God help you,' said Mr. Munch."