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About Aussie Christmas trees

Ok so this is not about MySQL… but as many MySQL people are from one country but living in another, there’s a common theme with certain experiences having to do with this “displacement”… in case you didn’t know, I am from The Netherlands, but live in Queensland, Australia.

In my family we have always been quite adament about getting a real Christmas tree – as in a live one. We even had real candles, but that’s another story (never had a fire though).

Anyway, Australia does have various pine varieties, but they look quite different from the Nordic varieties and in terms of shape they aren’t particularly suited to being an ornamental Christmas tree. There is also the issue of it being mid-summer in December, and this part of Australia is the sub-tropics. You get the picture, it would be fairly difficult to keep a live tree happy anyway. So most people here have a “fake” tree (gasp!), made of metal and fire-retardant plastic.

Harmony and I have actually found one that is pretty low on the cringe-scale. It looks like a real tree, without weird colours, built-in ornaments or whatever. And the bit that does the trick for me is that it is of the type “Odense”. Odense is a place in Denmark, which makes it of the exact shape I’m used to – Dutch trees mostly originate from Sweden and Denmark, either imported or locally grown from that same type.

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