She Tried to Return a Christmas Tree in March. It Was Still Decorated.

I run the returns desk at a big box home store, which is to say I am the person who witnesses human creativity at its absolute peak.

People try to return everything. Half-eaten rotisserie chickens. A ladder with paint on it. Once, a man tried to return a snow shovel in July "because it hadn't snowed," as if we controlled the weather and owed him a refund for the inconvenience of summer. But the crown jewel, the story I will be telling at parties when I am ninety, is the Christmas tree.

It was the second week of March. A woman rolls up to my desk pushing a flat cart, and on that cart is a Christmas tree. An artificial one, seven feet of it, fully assembled. And -- this is the part I need you to sit with -- still fully decorated. Lights. Ornaments. A tired-looking angel leaning off the top like she had seen things. There was tinsel. There was, I am not making this up, a candy cane still hooked on a branch.

"I'd like to return this," she said, as if this were a normal sentence a normal person says.

I looked at the tree. I looked at her. I looked at the candy cane.

"Do you have a receipt?" I asked, because that is where you start, even when your soul has left your body.

"I threw it out. In December. When I bought it." She said this like it was my fault. "But it's from here. I know it's from here."

Now our system does a lot, but it does not do "trust me." I explained, as gently as you can explain anything to a woman returning a decorated tree in spring, that without a receipt and given the season, I could not process a return on a Christmas tree that had clearly been standing in her living room since November.