The Matt Walsh Show - December 21, 2024


I'm Canceling Christmas Trees


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

196.83093

Word count

1,354

Sentence count

85

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Now that Christmas is officially over, let's talk about why Christmas trees are a thing of the past. And why you shouldn't have to have a real tree in your home to celebrate the season, if you don't already have one.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Now, today for our daily cancellation, now that Christmas season has officially, or rather unofficially,
00:00:05.480 the unofficially of the Christmas season actually starts on Christmas, I don't know if you knew that,
00:00:08.960 I'm going to take a bold, bold step that will only shock and offend you until you realize that I come not as your oppressor, but as your liberator.
00:00:16.920 Freedom!
00:00:24.360 I seek to free you and free all of us, once and for all, from the tyranny of Christmas trees.
00:00:29.100 Guys, Christmas trees are canceled.
00:00:32.300 Mom! 0.97
00:00:33.400 This madness has gone on for long enough.
00:00:35.500 I'm drawing the line in the sand right now.
00:00:37.420 No more Christmas trees.
00:00:38.220 We are done with Christmas trees.
00:00:40.060 Now, it may come as a surprise, but the early Christians never thought to cut down a tree and put it in their house for three weeks as part of their Christmas celebration.
00:00:49.720 One could only imagine how the conversation would have went had anyone suggested something like that.
00:00:54.160 Hey, it's almost Christmas.
00:00:55.080 What do you say we go and chop down that perfectly healthy tree out there, drag it inside, and watch it slowly die?
00:01:00.820 It'll be so festive.
00:01:05.400 My tree!
00:01:06.560 The idea probably would not have been warmly received.
00:01:08.820 And that's why nobody had a Christmas tree until some depraved lunatic in Germany, as always, 1.00
00:01:14.600 decided that there weren't enough distracting hassles associated with the holiday and came up with this idea.
00:01:20.080 And it was the worst thing anyone had done related to Christmas since St. Nick started the whole gift-giving thing,
00:01:26.400 which is another problem in and of itself.
00:01:27.820 This isn't the biggest bag over the head punch in the face I ever...
00:01:31.600 Damn it!
00:01:33.320 Son!
00:01:34.640 Now, admittedly, this history of Christmas and its traditions may not be entirely technically accurate, but that's not the point.
00:01:40.320 The point is that we are all burdening ourselves with this demented custom for no reason.
00:01:47.240 So there are, of course, two ways to approach the problem of obtaining, transporting, and erecting a tree inside your living room.
00:01:54.020 This, again, is a problem of our own making.
00:01:56.800 It's like if we're all stressed out about how to capture a squirrel from the forest and train it to do jumping jacks.
00:02:02.880 The most stress-free way of doing that is to not do it, because it's bizarre and pointless.
00:02:08.940 And there are a million better ways to spend your time.
00:02:11.620 But as far as trees go, you have two options, right?
00:02:13.480 You can go out and buy a real tree, or you can purchase an imposter, a fake tree, an avatar of a tree.
00:02:20.060 The problem with the fake tree is that it's a fake tree.
00:02:22.800 It's expensive and clunky.
00:02:24.680 It doesn't actually look anything like a real tree, much less does it smell like one.
00:02:28.740 So it's always awkward when you go to someone's house, and they have a fake tree, and they go, doesn't it look real?
00:02:34.440 No, it doesn't.
00:02:35.620 Have you ever seen a real tree?
00:02:37.120 They're outside.
00:02:37.780 You should go check them out, because this doesn't look anything like it.
00:02:41.620 You know what's annoying about the Christmas season?
00:02:43.780 Those super-targeted ads that seem to follow you everywhere.
00:02:47.100 You look at one gift idea for your cousin, and suddenly every website is bombarding you with similar products.
00:02:52.220 Well, here's the thing.
00:02:53.260 Your internet provider is actually tracking and storing everything you do online.
00:02:57.140 And companies like AT&T and Verizon can legally collect and sell your browsing data.
00:03:01.920 That's why I use ExpressVPN.
00:03:03.680 ExpressVPN reroutes your internet connection through their secure servers, so your internet provider can't see or log what you do online.
00:03:10.400 Now, you might be thinking, if I'm routing my data through a VPN, doesn't that just mean the VPN can see and log my activity instead?
00:03:16.140 It's a smart question.
00:03:16.840 While many VPNs claim to have a no-logs policy, ExpressVPN stands out because they use trusted server technology.
00:03:23.220 They were the first major VPN provider to engineer all of their servers to run in RAM, making it technically impossible for their servers to store any customer data.
00:03:31.660 And they've got the credentials to back this up.
00:03:33.400 They even had PwC, one of the biggest assurance firms, audit their technology.
00:03:38.560 Stop letting people keep logs of what you do online.
00:03:40.760 Visit expressvpn.com slash WalshYT right now and find out how you can get three months free.
00:03:47.600 See, whatever joy there is to be gained from a Christmas tree, you aren't going to get it from a fake one.
00:03:52.060 A family with a fake tree has given up.
00:03:54.120 They are just checking the tree box, trying to slide by on a technicality.
00:03:58.920 You might as well put a deflated basketball on your porch at Halloween instead of a pumpkin.
00:04:03.200 The stand-in is significantly more depressing than just not having it at all.
00:04:07.880 So that doesn't work.
00:04:08.780 But the real tree is worse.
00:04:10.380 First of all, it's going to run you upwards of $75 these days.
00:04:13.480 $75 for a hunk of lumber that will be decaying in a heap on your front lawn in less than a month.
00:04:18.180 You could buy a bottle of Blanton's single-barrel bourbon, Elijah Craig barrel-proof even, for that price.
00:04:24.860 And it will make you far jollier than any Christmas tree ever will, I assure you.
00:04:28.200 Look at these little glasses, these little bottles.
00:04:32.920 Isn't it cute?
00:04:34.000 It's like a whole bottle, but really small.
00:04:37.180 So after you've been basically stripped naked and robbed by the Christmas tree salesman,
00:04:41.180 you schlep the thing back to your house, you drag it inside,
00:04:43.860 pine needles falling and dispersing themselves into areas of the house
00:04:46.620 that you won't notice until sometime after Memorial Day.
00:04:49.460 Then begins the process of somehow getting this whole entire actual tree
00:04:53.260 to stand up straight in your house with nothing but a plastic tree stand
00:04:57.200 and a couple of screws keeping it in place.
00:04:59.060 If you do get it to stay in place, it'll inevitably be knocked over multiple times
00:05:02.360 by the dog, the cat, your kids, people and pets getting practically crushed to death left and right.
00:05:07.380 Meanwhile, the thing requires about 19 gallons of water a day just to keep it alive,
00:05:11.040 and barely so.
00:05:12.140 Now you have a half-dead, dried-out chunk of wood in your house
00:05:15.320 with electrical wires draped around it.
00:05:18.680 Maybe next we can develop an Easter tradition
00:05:20.640 where everybody jumps into a pool and plays catch with a toaster
00:05:23.900 plugged into an extension cord.
00:05:25.180 And then what happens as soon as Christmas is over?
00:05:32.900 It's like waking up with a hangover.
00:05:34.560 You look at that thing and all of the joy and spirit is sucked out of it.
00:05:39.040 Now you see it for the giant pile of sticks that it always was,
00:05:42.760 and you just want it out of your house.
00:05:44.820 Literally the day after Christmas, you're looking at your tree with disgust.
00:05:48.100 Everybody does.
00:05:48.860 Or if you have a fake tree, you just put off the hassle of taking it down
00:05:52.040 for months until you finally get around to it,
00:05:54.560 only because you don't want people judging you
00:05:56.540 when they come over for your 4th of July barbecue.
00:05:59.000 So the whole thing is madness, and it must end.
00:06:01.800 We must free ourselves.
00:06:03.980 We must stand up with one voice and refuse to be enslaved to this lunacy.
00:06:08.840 It's gone on for too long.
00:06:10.660 It ends today.
00:06:12.120 And that's going to do it for me.
00:06:13.240 My wife wants to go get a Christmas tree today, 0.80
00:06:15.080 so we're going to go do that.
00:06:22.040 The Christmas tree certainly seems to inspire a love-hate relationship.
00:06:26.280 All that time is spent selecting it and decorating it,
00:06:29.740 and then a week after, it's just thrown somewhere.
00:06:32.860 You see it by the side of the road.
00:06:34.400 It looks like a mob hit.
00:06:35.780 The car slows down, the door opens,
00:06:37.780 and this tree just rolls out.
00:06:39.200 Boom, boom, boom.
00:06:41.740 People snap out of that Christmas spirit like it was a drunken scooper.
00:06:45.600 They just wake up one morning and go,
00:06:47.560 Oh, my God, there's a tree inside the house!
00:06:50.820 Just throw it anywhere!