We wish you a Merry Lead Poisoning

I ended a post exactly a year ago today with the words "Now, let me tell you what I think of Christmas trees........ " I actually put in all those dots too - but I never really got back to the subject. I had been writing about my office "Holiday" party and I wanted to assure everybody that even though I am Jewish, I am not offended by Christmas.

Now about the trees - I like to entertain my friends every year with a (usually) drunken rant about how dangerous X-mas trees are. It's mostly tongue in cheek of course, you know - "Oh lets put a dead dry tree in the house and put cheap lights on it! That should be safe!! Then we can weigh it down with breakable glass ornaments and let the kids and pets play around it. Yeaaa!!"

One of the fun things about working around a bunch of scientist types is that fascinating and disturbing facts often come up in conversation. That is how I found out how Christmas trees can give you lead poisoning. This is a real scientific study so pay attention. It turns out that many of the popular artificial x-mas trees are made of poly-vinyl chloride plastic (or "PVC" - you may have seen its' work in pipes). In the past there was lead used in the molds in which the "trees" were formed. Many of the finished products were dripping with trace levels of toxic lead along with the tinsel. More fun for the kids- don't worry about eating paint anymore kids - but watch out for that tree. The scientist at work who told me about this even tested his artificial tree for lead (does that come before the caroling and after hanging the stockings by the chimney with care?)

I always thought the big danger of Christmas trees was fire, but now I'm not so sure. The "Mythbusters" on Discovery Channel recently did a show about x-mas trees causing fires, but it turns out that no matter how many lights you put on a tree it will not catch fire unless there is a spark from, lets say, a bad plug or cable. Then it will go up like an old blimp. There are many x-mas tree fires every year, so lets be careful out there. You don't even want to know what will happen if your lead covered plastic tree catches on fire. Merry Christmas!

Now, let me tell you about how anti-oxidents may keep you from spontaneously combusting...