Last night we watched a jewel of the TV Christmas show crown, 1965's A Charlie Brown Christmas, with its search for the meaning of Christmas amidst commercialized children (some gleefully, some reluctantly so) and innocence lost, most pointedly symbolized by a garish Christmas tree lot filled with neon-colored aluminum trees, stiffly reflecting both the searchlight glare and soulless artificiality of Christmas in mid-20th century America.

Charlie Brown — on mission get a tree to decorate the set of the Christmas pageant he is directing, and despite dire warnings to not screw up — is drawn in spite of himself to a kindred spirit, an unimpressive lonely little natural tree pining away in the shadows of its overwrought metallic rivals.

(click pic to play the game - note mutating fakes "sucking the spirit out of Christmas")

Charlie and his tree meet with an initial response of disgust and rejection, but after Linus gives his legendary Biblical speech on the meaning of Christmas as derived straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak, the chastened kids rally round the sorry sapling, performing a transformative miracle worthy of the season.

The flamboyantly artificial aluminum trees of the '50s and '60s fell out of favor — no doubt at least in part to the shame heaped upon them in the Charlie Brown special — as authenticity resumed preeminence over the next couple of decades, but now the tide has turned once again, this time in favor of the convenience and safety of quite real-looking artificial trees, causing the National Christmas Tree Association to howl foul.

In 1990, 35.4 million households featured real trees and 36.3 million displayed artificial trees, according to the NCTA, but by 2000, the split was 32 million live and 50.6 million artificial. And since 2000 sales of natural trees have dropped even more sharply, from 27.8 million in 2001 to 23.4 million last year. Since 2000, annual artificial tree sales have risen from 7.3 million to 9.6 million.

With yesterday's "Fuller Brush" and aluminum looks long out of fashion, today's inorganics are made from petrochemicals in factories in China and elsewhere in Asia. "The technology in artificial trees has really come a long way. It's really hard to tell if it is artificial without touching it," Bob Jacobson from Atlanta-based Home Depot, told the AP.