It’s that time of year, folks: the rain forests are burning, the president is upending democracy with every tweet, and the corporations have more rights than you. So it’s only right that holiday traditionalists are speaking up on what really matters: the appropriate time to put up your Christmas tree.

If you identify as a holiday traditionalist, then you are pretty sure that the only thing worth discussing right now is when a Christmas tree should descend from the attic, remove itself from its by-now shapeless box, and once again form itself into a symbol of nature that surely exists somewhere. And if you are a traditionalist, you know that the only answer to this debate is “after Thanksgiving.”

After all, if you put your Christmas tree up now, what does that mean for all of the decorative pumpkins that made their transition from Halloween scaries to nostalgic pilgrim luxuries? What does that mean for the cornucopia of fake fruit your child spent three weeks making at school because the education system is broken? What of the pilgrim costume your family shakes their head and rolls their eyes at when you put it on and leave your room like, “Eh? Eh? Remember this old thing?” even though you wore it just last year?

Well, I hate to break it to you, but the world is not doing so hot these days, and I do mean that figuratively, because the planet is actually burning to a crisp. Millennials are starting to put their Christmas trees up the day after Halloween because we do not know how much longer we can celebrate rampant consumerism without consequences. 

And baby, we’re going out on a high note. I mean, speaking personally, I might leave these lil Santa figurines up all year. I might start talking to them and telling them how it’s important to have someone listen to me about the moral compromises we make every day under capitalism. Maybe I’ll just tell them about my day and how it seems like, with the times we’re living in, everyone has legitimate clinical depression, which is cool because we can all relate, but if I’m being honest, makes me feel less special.

I’m also definitely going to keep the reindeer plush animals around. They will serve as a therapeutic tool for me to contemplate whether reindeers were ever real, and if they went extinct. I’ll use them sort of as a guiding tool when other animals go extinct so that I can recenter myself. All of the whales are dead?! Well, okay, but so are reindeer, and somehow we still get presents every year, so… it’s can’t be that bad, right?

I am 1,000% leaving up my Christmas tree year-round, and I’m just going to redecorate it for every season: you know, the impending infinite summer that awaits us. Eventually the tree will just remind me what trees looked like, and I’ll be sitting around the house with the TV on and music blasting when I catch a glimpse of it in the corner of my air-conditioned loft and go, “Oh, yeah, trees. Whatever happened to those?”

I don’t own one of those elaborate Christmas towns yet, but one day I hope to. It will be nice to know what a community looked like.

So, holiday traditionalists, respectfully, lay off. The world is dying, and we just want to remember the simpler times when we could feel something like cheer or hope instead of counting our lives through how many more times we’ll get to use these discounted LED lights before it’s all over.