The worst part of Christmas is when Christmas is over. All the anticipation of the big day is gone. All the presents have been unwrapped. All the delicious foods have been eaten. Then everything has to get cleaned up or thrown away and everybody goes back to work and then goes on diets to make up for all the holiday overindulgence. That’s why “Dry January” is such a clever name for the period of pulling back—January just feels kind of “dry,” as in “lame.”
The most symbolic gesture that the holidays are sadly over and done with is the less-than-ceremonial removal of the Christmas tree. Getting one and putting it up is so exciting and festive: You go to the farm or the lot, pick out the most perfect and magical one, then haul it home and adorn it with the keepsake ornaments you’ve had for your entire life. But then around New Year’s or so, you quietly and quickly remove all the ornaments as quickly as possible, and throw the now dry, needle-dropping once-green-now-brown-thing into the trash, the woods, or onto the curb so the Boy Scouts can come pick it up.
Dogs, however, don’t understand that Christmas is over. They like a tree being in the house. So much so that some just won’t stand for it when you try to get rid of yours. A woman named Erin Sharkey Graham posted a video to a Facebook group called The German Shepherd Dog Community. It shows her husband attempting to remove the family Christmas tree, which is an unwieldy situation as it is. It’s even harder to carry a tall tree when your two German Shepherds keep trying to wrestle control away from you.
Just over 24 hours after Graham posted her video on Facebook, it was viewed more than nine million times and shared by more than 150,000 people. Because this is a highly relatable problem—cleaning up after Christmas is the worst—and because it involves dogs (yay, dogs!), the video went quite viral and generated a lot of commentary.