Be warned: Christmas trees

I warned you that I cannot accept all Christmas traditions and fancies. Didn't I warn you? Don't say I didn't warn you, because I did.

So let's begin with the thing most of you having been fretting over for weeks. Real Christmas trees.

Before you say anything, SHUT UP people who have been to my house recently. Yes, I have a real potted living tree in my living room but this is only because the previous home owners left a very nice one in the garden for us, so I'm obliged to dress it and tend to it. And to be fair, this one seems unwilling to die or wilt, not matter how much wine I feed it when I get lonely.

My tree. Up close it looks much, much worse

But let no one labour under the illusion that I find anything acceptable about decorative perennials. No, no, let us be very clear about this - you are dragging an insect-infested, sap-spewing, neurotic woodland corpse into your home. And you're making your children touch it.

Sold from dubious car yards by bastards with gold teeth (the kind of men who cackle loudly when hacking the trees into shape, willing them to squeal), these trees turn even the most rational person into a gibbering wreck. We ignore them ten months out of the year, but they become the most important thing in the fucking world mid-November. Hours are spent deliberating over the best length and girth as though it's some kind of festive penis. Furniture is burned and relatives are sold to make room for their arrival. Garden centres have to employ cave trolls to battle the hordes of maniacs trying to snap up the last 8ft spruce.

Perhaps the biggest example of idiocy is when you bury your nose in the branches of your chosen tree and drone “ohhhh the divine smell!”

It's a tree. A TREE. There are thousands of them outside right now, I will wager that none of you feel compelled to hurl your face into the nearest oak while muttering “it's like Christmas in my lungs”.

If the purchasing process wasn't scrotum pulling enough, getting the bundle of sticks home is a hassle wrapped in a migrane dipped in cancer. Be they bound up in netting like a budget domantrix doll, or tied to your roof with your belt, shoelaces and knickers, the message is clear – they don't want to come to your house. Leave them alone! Stop forcing it! You're acting like a middle aged man with a bag of sweets and a homemade dungeon.

And when you get them home, the tree turns into a snivelling hypochondriac – it's too hot, it's too cold, they need more water, but not too much water, oh don't put me near the heater, you know what, just put me back outside, I just need a little air, it's chilly out here get me some tinsel!!!The second you put a foot wrong in its general care, it sheds half its needles akin to a dog pissing itself at the sound of a hoover.

When Christmas Day arrives, it just stands there in the corner like a distant relative's fat teenage son, depressed and listless, hurling glass baubles to the floor every few minutes in a bid for attention. Yet you still fuss, and coo, and make people look at it. Until the day after Boxing Day, when you will literally hurl it on to the street and complain every day that you can still see it until the bin men finally drag it away.

The only reason you buy real trees is to look just a little bit posh and to sniff derisively at your commoner friends with plastic ones.

I can make my peace with plastic trees. Yes, they are the McDonalds of the tree world, unrepentant in their bushy glory and with a long life that has come at the expensive of the pandas. Yes they won't ever die, and will probably rise up and destroy us at some point. But they're just....eh, they're just easier.

Still not convinced? Then look at these terrible trees (courtesy of www.thatslikewhoa.com) All of your trees are worse.