This is a picture of the famous Harold Lloyd’s Christmas Tree of 1974. According to some Internet resources, it took the Lloyds family a whole month to decorate it. Well, I have no idea how much this giant could weigh, but–

Cats of the world, keep away! 🙂

The tree was made by wiring three large Douglas firs together. The carcass was then fireproofed and reinforced with bamboo and steel bolts. The resulting giant was 20 feet high, 9 feet wide, and 30 feet in diameter. Thousands of Ornaments were used to decorate it. They say, Harrold Lloyd loved collecting Christmas ornaments, he would buy some  new items all the year round, wherever he used to travel. 

The tree is supposed to look beautiful, and– well, in human understanding it does, because it is perfectly proportional, amazingly luxurious, enormous in size, and it was ‘assembled’ of so many shining items, each one really beautiful in itself, that it wows everyone who takes a look at it.

But to me, it also looks bizarre, even a bit scary, especially now, when I know that it conceals three bodies of some day gorgeous and healthy trees and a mass of bamboo sticks and bolts.

It looks kind of scary because it reminds me of our world today: seemingly beautiful, shining and full of life, but being held together by quite a big mass of ugly stuff, and we, people people of the world, are nothing more than billions of shining, but freakishly vulnerable decorations, helplessly hanging down from it. Each of us knows this, but we prefer not to think about it: we keep hanging and shining, and pretending that there is nothing wrong with our big Mother tree.

I did not intend to make you sad by this post: I was just telling what I consider to be the truth. But if it did make you sad, it means that you also feel the way I do… at least a little bit. Do you?