Pre-Trimmed Tree

This very morning, I found a pre-trimmed tree in a little junk shop in the Wuhan University campus.

20 yuan, the man said.
Hao Ba, I replied.

I was delighted. The tree sure looked exhausted of yuletide cheer, but something about its existing constitution appealed to me, being myself exhausted of cheer and existing in my own constitution. The top was crooked like the man who sold me a tree last year – he was bent over too, and as bristly as Christmas tree salesmen come, bitter and crabby from standing around all day in the cold with a bunch of green deadweights. The tree’s head looked like it had been whacked out of profile a few times, maybe beaten up after a messy whiskey afternoon playing Trivial Pursuit with the family with tattered cracker-hats on the floor. Threadbare tinsel, Cantonese pink and Mandarin orange, formed a sleepy ‘S’ on the tree’s chest. There was one wiry string of silvery-white tinsel, brown-taped to a wonky branch, extending from the sleepy ‘S’ like Jack Frost’s tongue. Scattered around the upper body were a hundred Santas, all looking very thin and gaunt for my liking and his own too probably. I’d never seen Santa looking so slim before. Someone in China felt Santa needed to go on a diet and was directing their manufacturing lines in terms of this conviction.

Smiling, I began to leave the junk shop, happy I was now prepared and adequately equipped for a Chinese Christmas.

‘Happy Christmas,’ the man in the shop said, as I carried my pre-trimmed tree away.
I didn’t respond, as I didn’t hear it so clearly, and wasn’t sure if it was him who actually said it. Having written this now, I feel enormously guilty that I didn’t return that Happy Christmas, and expect to be taxed heavily on future pre-trimmed items purchased.