They burned witches once

     Let's linger over over the Supreme Court giving the nod to government-sanctioned prayer. Because while I dealt with it in yesterday's column, there are more aspects to consider.
     Why government? Why aren't prayers said before commercial events? Why don't we pray before the movie is screened, before a concert begins? Those are public venues, like meetings. Why doesn't a restaurant pause for public prayer? Everybody is about to eat—that's a traditional time for prayer. 
     Easy. Because those are commercial undertakings, and businesses don't want to alienate customers. Officially-sanctioned prayer is another government inefficiency and abuse of power. Companies know that it's unnecessary—people are already free to pray wherever and whenever they like. It's the show prayers that are the trouble. A high school game can have a prayer beforehand because they're in some jerkwater Texas town and most everybody is the same faith anyway. But the NFL isn't going to have all the fans bow their heads because it would be ludicrous and turn some paying customers off, by using prayer to stake out territory, to include some and exclude the rest.
     What does business know that government doesn't? Why can government exclude its own citizens, some of them, in this small but real fashion? Because the gesture is so insignificant? Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy said that prayer before public meetings is "ceremonial" —a trivializing comment that sucks the meaning out of prayer and would offend religious sorts, if they were thinking critically, which of course they're not.  
    Plus he's right, to a degree, in the sense that the various officials and residents waiting to complain about stuff aren't earnestly beseeching God to make the Boofaulk County Zoning Commission monthly meeting go smoothly. It's just introductory throat-clearing that they've done forever and few even think about beyond not wanting to stop.  You're not supposed to think about it, but eventually outsiders, Jews and atheists and other rabble, did think about it, and said, "Wait a minute! We thought this was the United States of America. Why do we have to listen to you pray to your God before we talk to the school board about the issue with the high school parking lot?" Thus the lawsuits, and this ruling, kicking us back toward the imaged Eden of the 1950s when white Protestants ruled supreme and the underclass, the foreigners and the colored and the Catholics, knew to keep their mouths shut.
     The ceremony is one of dominance. The prayer is like a dog peeing its territory, a quick marking of the spot: ours. Plus a display of the instruments of torture. We could be passing laws against you. We could be burning you. But instead, generous us, we're having a little prayer—you should be grateful. We'll even let you say your prayers, sometimes, a practice that, should it ever actually become prevalent, will kill off prayer at government meetings, one reason I'm not too worked up about this latest step backward. Various faiths and sects and cults and sub-beliefs lining up to say their prayers will instill within WASPs the value of secular government the same way that Affirmative Action made them embrace race-blind merit admissions. What worked when it was skewed to them won't be so pretty when other people try it. 
     
    Before parting, a word on the reaction to yesterday's column, which was considerable.
     Now the people who would want prayer before government functions, who do you suppose those people would be? The pious? The devout? The godly? No, not at least judging from the many who wrote in:
     "Just got done reading your article on prayer, and, I just wanted to email, the GOOD people finally won one," writes Dan B.  "LIVE WITH IT."

    "I’m sorry Christianity and praying to God to be thankful for what we have has ruined your day," writes Paul L. "You need to grow a little thicker skin."

     You get the idea. I particularly savored the first one, because I think it reflects the mindset behind the practice. "The GOOD people finally won one," "finally," as opposed to defeat after defeat—women dressing like whores, blacks not minding their place, gays forgetting they are going to hell—that they've been suffering. A rare bit of luck for Christianity, score one finally for the team, which has been on the ropes since Calvary. 
    It sounds preposterous, but that's how they think. Bullies are inevitably aggrieved, inevitably have a litany of wrongs and slights that rationalize their pushing other people around. They are the victims who are finally, thank God, finally getting justice.

     The truth is religion has had the whip hand, and it has gotten a pass, up to now, when the lightest restraints are placed gently upon it, and religion doesn't like it. Like any wild beast it wants to be free. Religion is at best a tool, a neutral tool. It can be used for good, and sometimes even is. No question about that. And it can be used for evil, great evil, and has been, continually. It is the rationale to oppress and murder and trivialize. Allowing prayer before government meetings is not itself intolerable. Rather, it is the last gasp of the intolerable.

    Or let's hope it's the last gasp, and not the first birth cry of it all coming back. Society swings through great cycles. They burned witches, once. They'll burn them again if we're not careful. If caring about this seems a big deal—and it does, to it's-our-country-ain't-it? Christians who just can't see what the fuss is about—then better to make a big deal out of it now, when state religion is in the cradle, then wait for it to grow up. Many countries are already there. Government-backed faith is ugly and un-American, and the Supreme Court just took a step in that direction.  Let's not follow them willingly. 

      

Let us pray...

     Before we begin today’s column, I’d like to open with a prayer. Please bow your heads and repeat after me:

     Eternal Father, thank you for guiding us and strengthening us, and helping us to know in our hearts where to have lunch. We praise your white and red checkered overalls, your Reagan-esque pompadour, your beatific smile, the giant burger you loft continually on our behalf at the entrance to your namesake restaurants and on your menus. O beloved Big Boy, protect us in our wayward hours, and guide us toward the salad bar, to counterbalance the caloric heft of your mighty triple-decker burgers. Anoint our lives with special sauce, as we enjoy this high-quality column. Amen.

     Now on to business. The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday that government can begin its various public functions with a sectarian prayer. The court ruled, 5-4, that the small town of Greece, New York, did not violate the Constitution by tucking Christian prayer, which included lines like, “the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross,” before its monthly meetings. The risk that citizens who are Jewish or Muslim or atheistic — or who worship the Big Boy burger mascot as a deity — might feel excluded or offended is not significant.

     “Offense ... does not equate to coercion,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote.

     And that is true. Nobody forces you to embrace a religion by inserting its prayers into the daily machinery of government. Northbrook could start its village board meetings with a priest in red, swinging incense and intoning Latin, and I wouldn’t feel coerced to abandon my faith, such as it is. But there is still a not-so-subtle message, a disconnect from being forced, before you’re allowed to air your concerns to the government, to participate in a little service for a faith to which you don’t ascribe, similar perhaps what you felt worshipping Big Boy (What? You didn’t say the prayer? What’s the matter with you? You’re not a Ronald McDonaldarian are you? I knew it!). Thus waiting to testify how the enormous illuminated cross they want to erect in front of Northbrook Village Hall (people who push their faith never stop pushing) will shine in my windows, disturbing my cats, I might wonder if perhaps this government, which supposedly represents me too, is in fact giving my views their fair weight.
     One out of four Americans isn't Christian, either because they worship another faith (a shock, I know, there are other faiths; sorry to be the one to tell you) or none at all. That's a big chunk of the country to shrug off. Yes, you can toss them a prayer or two. But this case isn't about towns wanting to celebrate diversity. It's about Christian prayer being jammed where it doesn't belong as a show of imaginary solidarity.
     If I showed up in Northbrook to deliver my Big Boy prayer, the trustees might permit it—how dare they suggest my religious conviction isn't sincere? But they'd also wonder: Why is he doing this? Why is he making a show of this ridiculous ideology when they have important business to conduct?
      Exactly. If we had a smoothly operating government, maybe a case could be made for nodding to faith. Give how deadlocked we are along party lines, introducing the haze of theology into a system already teetering on collapse is madness. Let's try to look impartially at this judicial change:
     A) The upside: a chance to recognize our nation's valuable religious heritage.
     B) The downside: the quarter of Americans who don't follow these beliefs are forced to attend an unfamiliar mini-church service before testifying in front of the zoning board (except on the days when the 99 percent of Americans who aren't Jewish or who aren't Muslim have to hear the rabbi or the imam pray, because it's only fair, and Tuesday it's the rabbi, then the Wiccan priest, then Rob Sherman eating an apple).
     How can the court decide A) trumps B)?
     I was joking with my Big Boy prayer. I don't even eat there anymore. Here's a sincere prayer, from the heart, that I will happily show up and utter before the next village board meeting: 

    Beloved Void. Please spare us from the nitwittery of our leaders and the hypocritical bullying of our fellow citizens. Brace our judges to understand that their it's-our-country-ain't-it? muscular Christianity went stale in 1962. Strengthen our officials' ability to actually do the job we elected them to do, for once, and not constantly be distracted with symbolic trifles while jamming their big bazoos into areas where government just doesn't belong. Temper the raging faux victimization of those who confuse toleration with being oppressed. Grant them the true knowledge that comes with humble self-awareness. And let us say, "Amen."

People will believe anything they see on TV

Great blue heron, Chicago Botanical Garden, 5/4/14

     Half of the 12.8 million people living in the state of Illinois would move away, if they only could find a way to break their chains. And about a fifth — 19 percent — say they plan to do so in the next year. Just load up the old Model T and head, well, anywhere. That happy place that isn’t Illinois; 17 percent believe Illinois is the worst state in the United States.

     Golly. 

     While the temptation is to deflect that with a quip — something like, “And after this past winter, who can blame them?”— it does seem a moment that calls for, if not soul-searching, then at least critical thought. We live in a hellhole, apparently, and didn’t even know it.

     My first instinct was to see if the poll was commissioned by Bruce Rauner. He’s staking his political future on convincing the electorate that our home state is a lousy place to live. Maybe he’s behind this.

Great blue heron

     Nope, Gallup poll. Fairly reliable. Illinois, dead last, with twice as many residents yearning for elsewhere than top-rated Hawaii. There, only 23 percent would like to move, though Gallup doesn’t record where. Where do you go to improve your lot if you’re already in Hawaii? Heaven, I suppose. 

     What’s going on here? 

     The Gallup folks wonder if it’s not due to the corruption that is uncovered here (oh sure, blame the media...) I don’t buy that. While we do miss the money siphoned into the pockets of these crooks, is it a reason to move? Blagojevich was  embarrassing but did he really make you want to leave? I mean, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California and being shamed in the media for fathering a child out of wedlock with his maid, did people start fleeing California? And we in Illinois have to be tougher than Californians, annealed as we are by our annual five-month plunge into the subzero icy blast furnace that is winter. 

     Illinois isn’t the poorest state, by far. It’s flat, yes, but has a nice lake adjacent to the part where most of the people live, plus several significant rivers. I don’t want to start slagging other states, but the number of people “extremely likely to move” is 10 percentage points lower in Indiana than in Illinois: 19 percent here, 10 percent there. Really? Almost half? Have you ever been to Indiana? From the post-apocalyptic moonscape of Gary, where tearing down a single eyesore high-rise shell downtown is hailed as an elephant step toward renewal, to the anodyne nowhere of Indianapolis and everywhere in between. Start listing the cities in Indiana: Fort Wayne, South Bend, Muncie, Evansville. . . .  How far do you get before you rush outside and kiss the ground?   

     Maybe it isn’t that Illinois is so bad, but people here are simply ambitious. Part of ambition is dissatisfaction, yearning for something better, and that often involves vague desire to go somewhere else. We’re like the heroes in a Bruce Springsteen song — one from 30 years ago, I mean, when he was still good. Restless, with our tricked-out ’51 Mercury in the driveway, some babe draped over the bench seat, tapping our feet, sick of home, wanting to go . . . anywhere. I’d rather live hungry in Illinois and be restless, dreaming of a better life, than grow fat with contentment in Indiana.

     My theory? Two things at work. I still blame Rauner, no matter who did the poll. If you turn on a television during the past three months, you see what? Commercials from Bruce Rauner telling us how lousy Illinois is. That has to have some effect — people drive Kias and drink cotton candy-flavored vodka. They believe TV ads, no matter how dumb. Call it the Rauner Effect.

     Second is the Mountain Effect. The most popular states in the poll—Wyoming, Alaska, Colorado—have mountains, which Illinois certainly does not, and egos inflate at elevation. Maybe it’s the thin air. My folks live in Colorado, and I could be living in Colorado, too, but the people there are so filled with self-satisfaction it’s like they’re ready to pop. They sit at their outdoor cafes guzzling chai and adjusting their ragwool socks, talking about their last colonic cleanse and how great it was to do yoga at dawn at Burning Man. They give happiness a bad name. I would rather be miserably trudging through the killing wind of Chicago on the worst day of last winter, eyes cast down on my steel-toe Red Wing boots, than some sandal-clad Boulder barista blissed out and playing the pan flute on the Pearl Street Mall.

     Just 1,000 feet difference between the highest and lowest spot in Illinois. Four of our last eight governors went to jail; one is still there. Our next governor might be a sneering half-billionaire who believes complete lack of experience qualifies a man for a difficult job. So what? We’re a tough state for tough people. Those who count love it.

Want to be loved, Rahm? Learn from Rob Ford.

   Being Americans, we tend to ignore foreign countries, even a nearby foreign country like Canada, which is just to the north of us, for those uncertain on geography. Maybe especially a foreign country like Canada because, really, what's going on in Canada? Not much.
    Except for Rob Ford, of course, the mayor of Toronto, who has "arguably become the most famous Canadian in the world," according to Robyn Doolittle, the Toronto Star reporter whose new book, Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story examines a man who is the refutation of every cliche about Canadians being dull and ordinary and passive and bitter and resentful and...well, you know. We all know about Rob Ford, blustering around with his various addictions, his cantilevered gut hanging out, like the fatter, drunker, less sophisticated older brother Chris Farley never had. 

Rob Ford

     Now Ford is in Chicago, supposedly, undergoing rehab, perhaps, at an undisclosed location. Or maybe he just passed through Chicago on his way to get rehab somewhere else. Or maybe he isn't in rehab at all, maybe that's just a ploy to get out of Toronto until the heat is off. Maybe he's a a party—that's more likely.
      But here's the interesting thing about Ford, in my view. The last poll I saw had him with a 43 percent approval rating. Still. Contrast that with Chicago's fitness fanatic mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose approval rate is 14 percent. So obviously these men aren't being judged on their personal lives. (Makes you wonder if all the chin music about the importance of politicians' characters, particularly during campaigns, is just a pretext for the media digging for private dirt, and for bitter candidate mudslinging. Maybe we don't really care how they behave; we just want the juicy details).
   

Rahm Emanuel

 We know what Rahm has done to garner disapproval: close schools without the requisite hand-holding and regretful clucking and cooing; try to fix the pension mess, which upset union workers who want those pensions; and in general struggling to solve the enormous woes of the city. That has made him unpopular, among the various groups whose ox would get nicked by his reforms. The mass of Chicagoans, whose future hangs in the balance, don't seem to care much. We'd rather go over the cliff than tighten our belts.
    That said, what has Rob Ford done to make himself popular? It can't be the boozing and drug taking, per se, right? 
    "To his loyal supporters," writes Doolittle, "Rob Ford is a man of the people, someone who has never claimed to be perfect and whose only goal is to defend the little guy; a politician who will return your call, look after your money and tell it like it is."
     That isn't quite the high standard that Canadians employ when, oh for instance, condemning the United States. There has to be more than that.
     "As mayor, Ford has had plenty of victories," writes Doolittle. "He repealed the unpopular vehicle registration tax, got the TTC designated an essential service"—TTC is the Toronto Transit Commission. In other words, he made the trains run on time— "and secured valuable concessions from the unions."
     Union concessions! Well, that ought to be encouraging to Rahm. The public may hate you for trying to fix the pension mess with the unions, but maybe if through some miracle you actually do it, it'll help your shoe-leather-high approval numbers. Or maybe that's just Canadians, who seem to have more of an interest in the real world and its problems than Americans, whose political system at times seems a noxious blend of complete hallucination, blind pig ignorance and concentrated spite.
      Still, there has to be some lesson here for Chicago's mayor. Maybe get himself video-taped—not smoking crack, of course, too out of character and it might affect his blood-oxygen levels during his next Triathlon. But maybe...eating a hot fudge sundae at Margie's Candies. A big smear of chocolate around Rahm's mouth, drinking from the little stainless steel pitcher, moaning with pleasure....
     I mean, at this point, it couldn't hurt him. Eight hours of crisply-photographed murmuring into a cell phone in the back of a black SUV and reading to kindergartners in CNN's "Chicagoland" only made his popularity problem worse. We need grainy video, late-night Rahm, biting into a jaw-distending Sptritzburger, grease running down his chin. The image that Rahm wants us to see—Rahm Emanuel, hero—isn't going to help him.  That's the Rob Ford secret. Voters don't want leaders who think they're heroes. They don't want iron disciplines multi-millionaires with the body-fat index of a hyena. They despise arrogance because it jabs a stick into their own desperate sense of unworth. They want to be led by regular joes, by human beings, even flawed human beings, even complete fuck-ups. Maybe especially complete fuck-ups. Gives 'em someone to feel superior to. People love that. A word to the wise....

Saturday fun: Where IS this?

     Two theories: one, I somehow managed to wander around the Loop for the past 20 years and just never notice this enormous hunk of, er, modern art prominently displayed in the lobby of one of our better-known downtown buildings. 
      Or two, I have seen it before, but my mind, in some kind of natural protective mechanism, just wipes itself clean of all memory of it, hitting some kind of mental reset button, perhaps during the REM sleep cycle. 
      Now regular readers know that I sometimes look askance at public art. But the Picasso in Daley Plaza is the Pieta compared to this thing, and Dubuffet's Snoopy in a Blender in front of the Thompson Center is the Venus de Milo.
      So the standard question: Where is this? Plus two bonus questions: 1) what is it? And 2) what do you think of it? And since the subject is art or, rather, "art," the winner will receive one of this blog's fine, limited edition posters, suitable for framing. 

Another few inches down the slippery slope

     A bad guy does something bad. It hardly matters what. He robs a bank. That’s it. He robs a bank, at gunpoint, and now he’s standing on the sidewalk. One hand holding the big bag of loot with a “$” on the side; other hand whips out his smartphone and calls his accomplice to bring around the getaway car.

     Only there’s something wrong with the phone, a short circuit. The phone explodes. Blows out an eardrum. The bad guy’s writhing in a pool of blood when the cops screech up to haul him off to the hospital, then jail.

     We’re all happy, right? Justice done. Bad guy caught. Robbery thwarted. The world made better. On to the next topic . . . lunch.

     Oh wait. There is a qualm, one single, lingering, nagging little problem with this satisfying scenario. That robber’s phone. Why did it explode like that? What does it say, perhaps ominously, about my phone? Might it explode, too, not when I’m robbing a bank, but while I’m doing some mundane, good-guy activity? That’s a tad worrisome.
     The above summarizes my reaction to the Donald Sterling scandal, where—to summarize for those reading this in 2026—the owner of the LA Clippers basketball team, a nasty, despised billionaire (is there any other kind?) with a long history of racial callousness was recorded telling his much younger female pal not to take her black friends to games. On Saturday, it was broadcast on the celebrity dirt website TMZ, and there was a day or two of shock—shock!—that somebody could hold these opinions. Then Adam Silver, the new head of the NBA, banned Sterling from games for life, fined him $2.5 million and pushed him to sell his team and, I guess, slink off into the shadows so he will trouble us no more.
     All richly deserved, by all indications. If there are any mitigating circumstances—his work tutoring puppies, perhaps—no one has stood up to cite them. And I'm certainly not defending Sterling. The various complexities—for instance, the recording perhaps coming from a maybe mistress (or "archivist" she claims) being sued by his wife to regain whatever baubles Sterling lavished on her to entice her to keep his company (or his documents).
     But. It's the swift journey from private slur to public destruction that gives pause. What exactly is the new social standard here? Because most people are not tuning forks of consistency and unblemished civility. They say stupid, rude things in private. They make mean jokes and, I imagine, speak to their husbands, wives, lovers and archivists in a way they don't want on TMZ.
     This issue echoes beyond aged bigots. Just as this sordid saga was unfolding, the U.S. Supreme Court began deciding under what circumstances the cops can take your cellphone and squeeze out the many secrets it contains, then prosecute you for them.
     I don't want to get all 1984 doom and gloom here. Society has a way of balancing as we adapt to our pocket miracles. A few junior high school Romeos get prosecuted for pornography after sending nekkid photos to their Juliets, but eventually we realize this isn't the best use of the legal system.
     Heck, maybe shaming via smartphone, if indeed Sterling's rant was recorded on a phone; it's murky now, will turn out to be a good thing. If enough jerks are ruined by recorded misdeeds—the mayor of Toronto is finally getting help now that another video supposedly showing him smoking drugs has surfaced—enough careers torpedoed and money lost, maybe people will behave. Once God was watching over us, and we did right because He knew every wrong act, every truant thought that crossed our minds. Now everyone has an iPhone or a Galaxy, and if Rahm Emanuel picks his nose in public, he risks becoming the Booger Mayor.
     So let's all line up in the street with our pitchforks and issue a rousing "hurrah" as Sterling is paraded past, straddling a rail. No loss to me—I never heard his name before a few days ago. But as we return to our cobbler's benches and chicken coops, we should puzzle over that bothersome question: What is private? Does anything you say become a public statement that can wreck you just because someone else records it? Was there perhaps a teensy bit of transference in the swift justice meted out to Sterling? 

      We can't solve our racial divisions or address the skewed slaughter in our streets or fix our schools. But we sure can boot this racist into history over something he told his girlfriend and/or archivist. He seemed to richly deserve it. But maybe the next guy won't. Those glad it happened to him won't be so glad if it happens to them. I can't help thinking that this is one of those societal moments we will look back on with a shiver.

Knitting together the public and the private

     We leave the decoration of public space to others. The city, not us, puts up bus stops and rents out billboards on those bus stops. It plants trees and strings them with lights in the winter. In summer, building owners plant flowers and put out flags.
     We don't. We walk through, minding our business, occasionally glancing around. Picking up garbage on the street that you yourself did not drop is practically an unbalanced act. Planting a tree on the public way is probably a misdemeanor of some kind. 
     Occasionally an individual will embellish a public space -- those memorials you see on highways marking where people have died in road accidents, whitewashed crosses and teddy bears and displays of sad plastic flowers.  It shows just how reluctant we are under normal circumstances to project ourselves into the public sphere, that it requires a terrible tragedy to move someone to decorate the side of the road. 
     Most folks, that is. Artists, however, take a different relationship to common space. Enjoying the freedom that creativity brings, and a certain degree of expected boldness, they understand that they can, if they choose, contribute to the beauty of our urban landscape, though the rest of us don't always appreciate it when it takes the form of, oh for instance, graffiti.
      In 2012, Pete Dungey, a British artist, created what he called "pothole gardens" -- little plantings in what are normally eyesores and dangers. It was part of a project he named, delightfully, "Subvert the Familiar," an important role for art.    
     In that same spirit, I noticed and admired this pink and blue striped handle cover that somebody knitted for the Big Belly garbage compactor at the corner of Madison and Wacker Drive. It was not an accidental act. Somebody had to conceive it, create it, and affix it to one of the corporate garbage cans that represent the fire sale sell-off of Chicago's infrastructure. I admired that it was so subtle. It wasn't showy. It was just there.
     What's the handle's purpose? Hell if I know. To pad and protect the fingers of those throwing stuff away? To look pretty? To get people like me thinking? Something else? I hope there isn't some common, well-known, prosaic explanation. "Geez, Neil, those are the pink and blue knit handle cozies that Girl Scouts have been putting on garbage can handles for years. Where have you been?"
      I noticed the knit cover on Sunday, on my way into the Lyric to see "The Sound of Music," and instantly quizzed its PR staff, wondering if perhaps it was some Austrian decoration—the trashundrecepticalmittenfruppy—they had put out, in some unfathomable cross-promotion of the musical. No, not them, they said. 
     The subject didn't weigh on my mind. But I did think about it, trucking south on Wacker Tuesday, and was pleased to see it was still there, not a tatter shred, but quite intact. The power of yarn. One reasons we usually don't arbitrarily decorate public spaces is the assumption that our loutish fellow citizens would destroy whatever we do, for the sheer joy of destruction. But the handle remained, at least for two days, perhaps because few noticed it, perhaps because those that did got into the unexpected whimsy of the thing and let it be. I like to think that is a factor. 

Update:

     When I wrote the above, I measured the odds of hearing from the person who knit this, decided they were slight, so didn't bother appealing to the public for an explanation. What I didn't realize—duh—is that there are very few isolated expressions of individuality nowadays that can't be immediately slotted into a movement, a genre, a term. In this case, it is "yarn bombing," or ... ready? ... "guerrilla knitting," and there are far more elaborate examples to be found around Chicago, such as these at Logan Square. The practice has its own Wikipedia page, which trace the practice back to the 1990s, and shares some clever examples, such as wrapping a tank at a military museum in Germany. 
     I wouldn't mind hearing from a yarn bomber (nice to hear that term given a new meaning) about the appeal, though a very good guess immediately springs to mind. People who knit, who like the physical act of knitting, are faced with the challenge of what to do with the result of their passion. There are only so many loved ones who are willing to accept so many scarves, sweaters, afghans, etc. Thus yarn bombing seems to offer a perfect solution. Takes a lot of knitting to wrap a tree. Plus you get to be artistic and neighborly too.