Environmental Group Releases Tree Movie for Holiday Season

Posted by Cynical Sarah on December 20, 2006

The holiday season isn’t the best time of year to be a tree. At least that’s the message that Earthguard, an international environmental group, wants people to think. This holiday season the group has created a movie about trees and how hard their lives are at this time of year around the world.

The movie, “A Not-So-Happy Tree Holiday,” is a full-length animated feature film. The main characters are various types of trees that are common targets during the holiday season.

“What we wanted people to see is that this isn’t just a harmless season for the environment,” said Preston Wood, Earthguard board member. “Trees in particular are hit hard during the holiday season.”

The movie delves into how pine trees are grown and needlessly slaughtered so people can have real trees to decorate for Christmas. There are many other hazards for trees during the season as well.

“From burning yule logs, to Christmas trees, to the paper used to create the daily sales flyers that stores put out in the weeks leading up the Christmas Day, it’s crazy all the different things that trees are killed for every year at this time,” Wood said.

The movie highlights the particular cruelty of growing trees on farms only to cut them down when they reach the optimal Christmas tree height. The movie shows a family of pines that are split up over the years as they each reach the right stage in life to become a Christmas tree.

At first, the trees are all excited about reaching that goal and attaining such a prestigious level in life, until they realize that becoming a Christmas tree can only happen by being cut down and dying.

“I liken it to raising animals like chinchillas or minks on farms to create fur coats,” Wood said. “It’s all just for completely unnecessary adornment. Nobody “needs” a fur coat, and nobody “needs” a real pine tree for Christmas. In this day and age, the fake ones look very real and are so much more practical.”

There are sad moments throughout the movie as the pine family is split up and as more horrors of a tree’s life are revealed. Polly Pine is slowly wasting away in a family home. She’s all dressed up for the holidays but her needles are drying out and falling on advertisements from various businesses that are having holiday sales.

As Polly laments her demise, she realizes that she can tell what tree was cut down and used to make the paper in the flyers – her old friend Andy Aspen.

That moment awakens her to the real nightmare her life has become. All around her are examples of her fellow trees that have died to bring a better life to the humans. There’s a yule log crackling in the fireplace, the family is ripping paper napkins off a role to use while they eat their hickory smoked turkey.

“By the end of the movie, there won’t be a dry eye in the theater,” Wood said. “There’s no escaping how much hell the trees go through when you realize how much we use them for.”

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