Trump Signs An Order Renaming The Artificial Christmas Tree The Super Christmas Tree, And The Culture Desk Goes To The Lot To See What Else Moved
The word artificial made the tree sound fake, the order says, and the tree is not fake, it is in a box in the garage with the lights already on it. Simone Delacroix spends a Saturday among the relieved, the relabeled and the growers who would now like a word of their own.
The order was signed on Thursday and the lot opened on Friday, which is the first time in this desk's career that federal policy and seasonal retail have arrived in the same week on the same subject. It is titled Inaugurating The Era Of The Super Christmas Tree, it is two pages, and it directs the executive branch to say super Christmas tree where it has said artificial Christmas tree and to stop acknowledging the older phrase in any applicable setting. The reasoning is the reasoning the September order gave for intelligence, and it is given in the same words with one noun swapped: the word artificial makes the tree sound fake, and the tree is not fake. It is, the preamble says, actually amazing. It comes with the lights on.
This desk went to the lot expecting a farce and has come back with a notebook full of sap and a different story, which is the one this piece is about. Everybody in the Christmas tree business has been arguing over an adjective for forty years, and on Thursday the only office in the country that could end the argument did, by choosing a different adjective and leaving the tree where it was. The desk's position on the well-done steak is on the record and it turns out to apply.
The Definition Points At The Old Definition
The order defines the super Christmas tree by reference to the tariff schedule's existing line for the artificial one, so the thing the order renames is defined as the thing it was called before. That is the same move the September order made with the statute and it produces the same result: a super Christmas tree is not required to exceed any natural tree in any respect. It is required to be the tree in the box. A White House science official has sixty days to propose legislative language that could modify, expand upon or otherwise supersede the older phrase, and the desk notes that the same official already has a sixty-day clock running on intelligence, so the two words come due in the same week. The council that represents the people who make the box has been making the order's point since 1987, from the other direction. Artificial, it has said in forty years of pamphlets, does not mean fake. It means made. The pamphlets did not take. The order took in an afternoon.
The Lobby Is Relieved, And Was Already Compliant
The American Super Tree Council, which was the Artificial Tree Council until Thursday night and the Permanent Tree Council before that, so that this is its third name since spring, issued a statement at nine in the evening that this desk would describe as relief if relief came on letterhead. Its executive director has spent twenty-two years telling reporters that her members' trees are not fake, and the reporters have spent twenty-two years writing fake in the second paragraph anyway. She said the council was pleased to note that it had used the word super on its own packaging for years, in Super Full and Super Slim and Super Flocked, and so considered itself in compliance before the ink dried. This desk read the council's own frequently asked questions page on Friday morning and counted the word artificial forty-four times. By Friday evening the word was gone and the page was two hundred words shorter, which is what happens to a document when you remove the word it was written to defend.
"We have spent forty years explaining that artificial does not mean fake. It means somebody made it, carefully, with a tip count. The President did it in one sentence, and I would be lying if I said I was not a little annoyed that it was that easy." The executive director of the American Super Tree Council, Friday
The Growers Would Like A Word Too
The growers were not consulted and have noticed. The Fraser Fir Growers' Alliance of the Blue Ridge, which represents the people who put a seedling in the ground in Ashe County and wait nine years, filed a letter with the White House on Friday asking that if the box is to be called super, the field be called something, and the something they have chosen is Natural Intelligence. A tree that grows itself for nine years in a field, the letter says, knows something, and the alliance would like that acknowledged in the same instrument that acknowledged the box. The desk drove to a grower's lot in the afternoon and the sign had already been repainted. It reads NATURAL INTELLIGENCE FRASER FIR, 7 TO 8 FT, and under it the price, which has not moved either. The grower said he had not waited for the White House because the White House had not waited for him.
He also said, and this is the part the desk wrote down twice, that he had never once called the other kind fake. He called it the other kind. His customers, standing in his lot in October with a thermos, call both kinds the tree, and have called them the tree from the garage to the living room since the Carter administration, and have never in his hearing used either adjective. The forty-year argument has been conducted entirely by the two parties selling, over the heads of the one party buying, who did not know there was an argument.
Four Hundred And Eleven Tags, One Clerk, Same Tree
Hollenbeck's Home and Garden, sixty-one stores across four states, relabeled its inventory overnight. The chief merchandising officer's memo to store managers ran to one line, which the desk has seen and which reads, in full, No more artificial. Super, it's better. At the Falls Church store the relabel was done by one stock clerk with a label gun between ten at night and two in the morning, and she gave the desk the number without being asked: four hundred and eleven tags. The point-of-sale system was not relabeled, because the description field is twenty-four characters and nobody with the password was in the building, so the receipt the chain prints still says ART TREE 7.5 PRELIT, the shelf above it says SUPER CHRISTMAS TREE, 7.5 FT, PRE-LIT, and the tree between the two is unaware of either. She said she checked one. She opened the box, looked at the tree, and closed the box. The desk did the same with a different box. It is the same tree.
"Nothing about the trees changed except the word. People keep calling to ask what else the order does, and the answer is that it is an order about a word, and it did the word. That is what an order is. If you want the tree changed you are calling the wrong building." A White House aide, speaking on the condition that the desk not use the older adjective in the same paragraph as the aide's job title
The Thread
The Washington version of this story is that a word moved and nothing else did, and it is delivered as an indictment. On the lot it reads the other way. Everything on the lot has been fighting over a word for forty years: the box people over artificial, which they say means made, and the field people over real, which they have never said aloud means the other one is not, and does. The one party on the lot with no stake in either word is the customer, and the one thing the order did was pick a word and leave the tree alone. This desk has covered a great deal of federal attention to consumer goods and cannot think of another instance in which the government reached into an aisle and touched only the tag. A product that has been apologizing for its own adjective since 1987 has been told, by the one office that could tell it, that it can stop. The desk did not expect to find that a kindness. It found it a kindness.
The tree, for the record, is seven and a half feet, pre-lit, four hundred and fifty tips, and it has been in a box in a garage in Falls Church since January, and it did not know it was artificial and it does not know it is super. This desk's grandmother in Port-au-Prince kept one for thirty years and called it the tree, and the desk, which has argued at length in these pages that a steak is not improved or diminished by what the menu calls it, is going to have to concede that she had the thread before any of us.
Desk note: the Super Intelligence order of September 29 has been read by this desk twice, and a rocket company has since announced that the two letters in its own name will change to match, which makes three names for that company since February and puts it level with the tree council. This desk's standing position from the steak file applies without amendment: a culture that argues about the adjective is arguing about something else. In the tree aisle the something else is which of two industries gets to imply the other one is lying, and the order, by giving the box a word and the field nothing, has for the first time in forty years made the argument one-sided, which is not the same as settling it. The growers' letter is in the file and the desk expects it to be answered, because the one thing this administration has demonstrated about words is that it will issue another one.