My Protestant-American Experience

Last week in Hilo I did something heretofore unimaginable. Eisa and I went, on a Saturday morning, with all our Coke-guzzling American counterparts, to that veritable retail cornucopia: Wal-Mart. We did not go in search of white bread or Twizzlers or Bounty, no. We went to get a Christmas Tree.

Now, my family is Jewish, and though I'm rather hostile towards religion, if I'm going to make any symbolic tips of the hat to organized religion (or even unorganized spirituality), they're going to be things like menorahs and matzoh (I like the ones with onion and sea salt). But there I was in everyone's favorite Christmas-spirit megastore, comparing tree stands, looking for lights, and trying to choose between Norfolk Pine and Douglas Fir.

We got one, and though my search for appropriate Jew-naments went unfulfilled, I like the piney smell in our house and I like the lights. Eisa said I couldn't call it a Jesus Tree (though why should I have to use his last name to talk about the tree), but I was fine with that.

But then, news that perhaps this was not the prototypical Protestant-American experience. Hilo ran out of Christmas trees, almost three weeks before the big day, and they weren't going to get any more. No express boats from the Pacific Northwest were en route. Turns out our little spindly green friend was one of the last of his kind, and a shortage is neither typically Wal-Mart nor typically American.