Wednesday, November 23, 2011

What's Christmas All About?






My previous post was a short photo-essay on a non-native tree, the pistache.  The current one is more typical of my work in that it focuses on a native species, the Mountain Ash, and pays some attention to the season, in this case the "holiday" season.  To partially answer my title question: Christmas is partly about red and green, thus the Mountain Ash.  It is also about buying lots of stuff, thus the despicable message on the window of a local shop.  Maybe this was meant to be satirical, but maybe it wasn't.  It might be interesting to do a natural history of Black Friday.  Some merchants are acting a bit sheepish and apologetic about continuing the pressure to launch the Christmas shopping season earlier and earlier, yet doing it anyway.  One such example is a merchant calling the big day "plaid Friday."  I hope that posting the bottom photo will suffice to get my cynical streak out of the way.  Then, over the coming days I will post items about ties between nature and traditional celebrations of the season.  From the perspective of a naturalist, the many different pagan celebrations are the richer field to mine.  Stay tuned, and Happy Thanksgiving. 

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