Do you know what a postal processing machine does to cranberries and popcorn in Express Mail envelopes? Does “mush” mean anything to you? The evergreens were fine. G-d made these trees to resist heavy rain, sleet, and other stresses. He apparently didn’t do the same with popcorn and cranberries. It probably never occurred to Him that some lunatic from the Bronx would decide to send thousands of them through the mail.

On the morning of December 24, when people opened the mail and saw the decorations, most of the people didn’t worry, but were just glad to get their tree. And who knows, probably most of the popcorn and cranberries made it through all right. But some weren’t so happy—enough so that pretty soon consumer protection agencies and reporters across America were hearing about the “outrageous fraud” we’d perpetrated. We’d sent people squished cranberries and popcorn in a plastic bag with a note that read, “traditional Christmas decorations.” We were just trying to make fun of them. Something had to be done.

You can easily explain away how a chopstick could break in the mail or a pet plant fail to arrive. Just send a new chopstick or pet plant and everything’s okay. But to deliberately go out and try to destroy Christmas—to send people cranberry mush and goad them with a cryptic note? There were no amends for this kind of outrage. This was a crime that needed to be punished. This was a crime that could get some assistant attorney general some real publicity and really launch his career.

Only our tens of thousands of Express Mail receipts, showing the volume of trees shipped and the fact that the ad never specified what kind of decorations were to be shipped, got us off the legal hook. But not before I got a really good scare. And this didn’t stop the consumer reporters from having a field day with us.

The last straw came via my dorm room TV shortly after winter break. Sharon King, the local NBC affiliate’s ace consumer reporter, was on with a really big story of a consumer fraud. You guessed it, our trees.

Seems some mother of a Vietnam soldier killed in action ordered a tree to plant and decorate at her son’s grave. Imagine her distress when she got the tree and found crushed cranberry popcorn. Of course, she didn’t plant the tree. She couldn’t. She sent it to NBC. And there it was now, three weeks later, unwatered, almost dead. And there was the cranberry Baggie, now fermented, with the note: “Traditional Christmas decorations.” “Let’s all give a Bronx cheer for this company,” the moderator intoned.