An excerpt from “The Local” Published: 15 Dec 08 10:49 CET
Unknown perpetrators have cut off the tops of some 2,400 Christmas trees and sprayed them with diesel fuel in the town of Kamp-Lintfort in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, according to Cologne daily Express.
“The Christmas business is ruined,” 65-year-old Annegret Tersteeden told the paper of her spruce tree stand on Sunday. The retiree had some 3,000 trees, the majority of which are no longer suitable for sale.
The paper speculates that the Grinch-like crime was committed by what it calls the “Christmas tree mafia,” because of stiff competition between tree sellers in the area. “It was an act of revenge,” Tersteeden said of the damaged spruce and Nordmann fir trees. “Who would buy a tree without a top that stinks like oil?”
“We’ve never had anything like this,” police spokesman Heinz van Baal told Express. “One can’t just do this in passing. It was several perpetrators at work throughout the night,” he said, estimating the damage to be above €80,000.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years to enhance my small pension,” Tersteegen said. “This mess just before Christmas has effected me deeply.”
‘What a ridiculous sad story!!!’, I thought. I pity the 65 year old retiree who lost her joy that comes to her by selling those fir trees. I wish her to find the everlasting joy of her life in Jesus. And what I really try to get to my mind is, what does a fir or a pine tree have to do with the good news of great joy that will be for all the people, that the angel Gabriel was talking about to the shepherds who were keeping watch over their flocks at night some 2000 years ago?
The Germans do invent trees that are beyond explanations huh! And the English popularize what the Germans invent. Actually, it is said, that an oak was the first Christmas tree and it wasn’t even decorated. In the 700 AD a monk named Boniface cut down the sacred oak tree that the pagan Germanians used to believe in as their power source. My own personal guess is that (I am completely off here, but who cares, its Christmas right?) when the Roman Catholic Church in the 4th century created the 24th of December to be the day to celebrate Christmas Eve, the oaks had long shed all their leaves in autumn and stood bare, so they took the evergreen fir trees and made a song out of it, “O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, wie schoen sind deine Blaetter!” Eh.., wait a sec, where are the ‘blaetter’ in Tannenbaum, don’t they grow ‘nadeln’?
Take Arno Backhaus for example, a German artist near Kassel in Germany. He stands with a big smile on his face and an anti religious advertising placard in his hand that says, “Why would you wanna celebrate the birthday of Jesus so lavishly? After all, you really don’t take him that serious, do you?” When curious ‘Christmas-people’ dare to ask him at the ‘Christmas-markets’ why he does what he does, he simply tells them about the Jesus that is not plastic and cotton wool that gives a month of emotional excitement, but the one who is flesh and blood, who gives everlasting joy even in the days of pain and sorrow, frustration and hopelessness.
O Christmas tree 
