Jill Murray

YA author Mary Rose Wood asks,

There is something very strange happening on my dining room table. See for yourself.

It’s a poinsetta. Yes, I know. The mysterious plant that turns up every holiday season, causing people to wonder and wonder yet again: are the red parts leaves, or flowers?”

I’m beyond that now. I’m on to bigger questions. Like, when will this thing die, already?

I know the answer to this question– not because I have a green thumb, which I don’t. I’ve done OK with some patio vegetables, but indoors, I’d be hard-pressed to figure out how to keep an air fern alive– I’ve killed cati, for crying out loud– but because every year for about a decade, my mother received at least two poinsettias at Christmas, and loving woman that she is, could never bear to throw them out once she ran out of ideas about what to DO about them. It was her pity that kept them alive all those years.

My answswer to Mary Rose:

Sorry hun, that’s a PERENNIAL you got there. It is NEVER going to die, global warming or no. Much like pet rabbits once Easter is over, your Christmas plant is going to keep on living.

Sadly, it’s kind of all downhill from here because soon, it will drop its pollen and then its red leaves will turn green, but it will KEEP ON KEEPING ON and then you’ll REALLY be wondering what its point is.

Until then, here are some things you can do with your pointsettia:

• Make its red leaves into a dye for, um… I dunno, improving stuff that could be redder
• Take it to Peru, where apparently they like ‘em better.
• Amuse yourself for hours by thinking of it under one of its other (funnier) names: “lobster flower.”
• (Hahahaha….. Lobster Flower)
• Make a voodoo doll of Paul Ecke. Apparently, 90% of the world’s poinsettias come from his ranch. The loser
• Contemplate how the fact that 80% of Poinsettias are purchased by women reflects back on contemporary gender politics.
• Try to teach it to play football, so it can compete in the Poinsettia Bowl.
• Rip it from its pot and nail it to your front door, as a warning to all the other poinsettias. Seriously, do it, or you’ll end up like my mother, with a room full of green poinsettias, bagging them in green cinch-tie hefty bags by moonlight and dragging them down to the foot of the driveway in the chill of a bleak November night.

There’s a whole bunch of voodoo you can use to make it red again once it’s not.
How much do you love shady places and re-potting?