The garbage man hasn’t picked up my Christmas tree yet. I dutifully put it out to the curb on Twelfth Night, just like the ancients proscribed, expecting it would be out of my sight at the next pick up date. But apparently there was quicker curbside service in the eastern Mediterranean during Biblical times. It’s not that it’s a nuisance out there. It’s just remembering the difficulty in taking the tree from the living room to the street. Putting it out was hard to do, not only because it was heavy and prickly and sticky and sappy, but also because it was frightening.

Yes, frightening. As Dewey Finn would explain, my Christmas tree had “a head, …and a mind, …and a brain.”

And if you think trees aren’t conscious and can’t think, then brother you just haven’t seen The Two Towers.

I couldn’t keep my Fangorn Ent in the house any longer: It was simply shedding too much. At the beginning of the holidays, it was fine and healthy and green, drinking from its water tray through its amputated trunk like any good fir on sale at Wal-Mart. Then, around the Christmas Eve party, it stopped drinking and began to shed. Interestingly, at the same time the tree was experiencing difficulty holding onto glass bulb ornaments, all my prized Scotch disappeared. Perhaps the two incidents are not connected. But what really made me realize this was no ordinary but rather a thinking tree was its timing: It only shed at specific, conspicuous times.

For instance, the first big surge of shedding occurred suspiciously at the same time its cousin, the bald cypress in my back yard, lost all its leaves. As it turns out, there was a clear line of sight through the porch doors between the indoor Christmas fir and the outdoor cypress. And apparently my tree found the Spanish moss adorning the bald cypress quite attractive: I caught a couple of squirrels scratching at the front door and ringing the doorbell at all hours of the night, leaving behind little wads of moss. Why would squirrels want to carry moss inside a house, much less through the front door the same way the tree entered?

Here’s the answer: I think the tree was controlling their minds.

I think the tree was controlling the cat as well. As soon as the tree started to shed, the cat started to shed. As soon as the tree dropped a bulb, the cat began clawing down and crashing bulbs. As soon as the tree began aspirating fluid from its water tray, the cat started drinking from it as well. And around this time, interestingly enough, the cat suppressed its nasty habit of tail-wiggling near wooden objects.

Besides having these trans-psychic powers, the tree displayed some higher-level emotion, too. In fact, it shed the most on the day James Brown died. I programmed a CD for my tree, playing “Poplar’s Got a Band New Bag” and “I Feel Good (I Got Yew)” over and over and over again for the entire day. But it was no use: I had to sweep every hour.

And besides sorrow, my tree could get mad, too. I think it objected to becoming a Christmas tree. The tree would often shed during the evening news, on which it saw lots of people this year objecting to public display of Christmas trees for religious reasons. I never called my tree a Christmas tree: Why did it assume it was? Was it the Wal-Mart sticker around its upper trunk? All that sticker said was “Frasier Fir.” Next year I should get a Muhammad Ali Fir.

And fear, too. A friend of mine gave me a bonsai tree for Christmas. The second I unwrapped it, the tree shuddered and shed. Maybe the Christmas tree became frightened when I brought the tiny hardwood in the house, like a classic meek-and-mighty story. After all, elephants are afraid of mice, Clinton was afraid of Perot, and Brian Urlacher was afraid of Reggie Bush.

Maybe the garbage men are afraid of my tree. Maybe they heard it talk. Used to be there was a special pick up for disposed Christmas trees that took them to wetlands reclamation sites, where they’d be submerged across a current and hopefully serve to catch and retain enough silt to support the growth of grass. Oh, how my tree would hate the idea of having to get its branches wet and dirty.

Well, it might control the cat and the squirrels, but my tree will not control me. It’s not going to just lie out there in the wet and cold directing the minds of caddis fly larvae to cocoon and pupate from its barren fronds. I’m going to go out and take it back in from the cold, set it upright in its water tray, and crank up the DVD of The Two Towers, which on my copy is interestingly always cued to the scene when the Ents storm Isengard. That’ll show it who’s the higher primate in the house. First, however, I’ll have to hide the bonsai. And the Scotch.