How to dispose of a Christmas tree

-or-
"How to dispose of a Christmas tree"

Well, as usual, our family Christmas tree didn't leave the house until late January. It then spent a couple of months sitting in the wood shed and becoming very, very dry. We knew we'd have to dispose of it sooner or later, so finally on Friday, March 25, we hauled it out. The plan: complete and total burnination.

The question, then, was how to convert one eight-foot tall Noble Fir into a smoldering pile of carbon in the most spectacular manner possible. It just so happened that we had a big box full of fireworks left over from the previous year. The implications were obvious, so we set to work right away.

What follows is a photographic documentary of the events that transpired. I can only hope the contents of this page are never used against me in a court of law.

- Mr. Accident

Phase I: Munitions

This is what we had to start with. A box of a dozen 1½-inch shells, two skyrockets (big bottle rockets, even ;B), and 192 bottle rockets. We had much, much more in the big box o' munitions, but there's only so much you can stuff in a single tree, and you never know when the rest of it might come in handy.

Fun Trivia Fact: The board the fireworks are sitting on has "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" scribbled on it in charcoal. Just thought you'd like to know.

It's kinda blurry, but that label says "crackling peony". I don't know why that sounds funny; it just does. Now it's time to decorate the tree with these little beauties.

Phase II: Decoration

There's still some tinsel on the tree. Nobody ever gets all the tinsel off. Shameful, shameful tinsel.

Wrapping the long fuses around the branches works fine. I put the bulk of these things around the top so they'd all go about the same time.

Now for the bottle rockets. We always get too many of these things around the 4th of July, so we have hundreds of them sitting around all year. This seemed like a good opportunity to reduce our stockpile.

The decorations are on the tree, ready to go. This thing was completely stuffed with bottle rockets. I made an effort to ensure that they were all pointing more or less upward, but I couldn't make any guarantees. Heheheh.

One of the skyrockets was placed at the top to finish the whole thing off nicely. The other rocket was stuck in the back of the tree somewhere, pointed either out into the woods or at the neighbor's house, or maybe both.

And here it is, in all its glory. One eight-foot noble fir, resting in a cardboard box.

Phase III: Ignition

The leprechaun tells me to burn things!

This actually took a few tries. For being so dry and brittle, it was surprisingly hard to ignite with a pocket lighter.

Once it got going, though, it didn't mess around. This is just a few seconds after ignition, when I stopped at a decidedly unsafe distance to take the first picture.

It didn't take long for the tree to light up like a torch. This is why you don't want to keep live Christmas trees in your house for too long. At this point, several of the bottle rockets have already gone off.

Phase IV: Run Like Heck

Here's where the fun begins. The streak on the right is the trail left by a bottle rocket; that little flash near the bottom of the tree is the ejection charge on one of the shells, which is now about to explode. Frankly, it's hard to tell exactly what was going on from this point; things got kind of hectic. I think the skyrocket is already gone at this point.

This is the best picture of the bunch. It shows the moment of triumph at which one of the 1½" shells exploded. There were twelve of these moments, actually, but I was using a slow and crappy digital camera, so I'm lucky I even got this one.

These shells are usually meant to be launched out of a tube and exploded at an altitude of about 150 feet, but they're much more impressive at ground level. >:D

The hottest part of the show is winding down now; not much is left of the oil-rich fir needlage.

Trogdor would be proud.

The skeletal remains of the tree, burning merrily. Now you can see the branches we used to prop up the tree so it wouldn't topple over and fire all of its bottle rockets at us. :P

There's not much left at this point. Almost everything has been burned or exploded, although there were some bottle rockets that remained sizzling in there for quite a while, only to burst when least expected.

The mass of white fluffy ash is a result of the cardboard boxes that were tossed on after the show.

About the Pyromaniac

Mr. Accident is definitely not in his right mind; that much is certain.

A dedicated PK Hacker who watches "The A-Team" far too much for his own good, he enjoys various pursuits in software engineering and building lethal weapons and medieval siege equipment out of common household items like pencils and rubber bands.