Routinely, Rick's List doesn't require visual support from photographs or illustrations. The words alone, I humbly feel, paint wondrous pictures previously imagined only by the lush romanticists Caspar David Friedrich and that Goya guy when he came up with "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters." (If you look at a print of that etching, I'm the bird-of-prey just over that artist's right shoulder; the one with eyes like Christopher Walken.)

This Edition requires help, though. Gaze, please, at that starkest of all post-holiday images: the defrocked Christmas tree, gutter-tossed in front of our house like a dignity-free cadaver sprawled on a picnic table. Sad, right?

Yes, except: It's NOT OUR CHRISTMAS TREE!

No, as my wife, Eileen Jenkins, tweeted in eloquent fashion — it can't be quoted in a family newspaper but I'll paraphrase — some presumably Christian celebrants, finished observing the birth of He Who Is The Most Charitable, decided to dump their tree on our property. A few spontaneous thoughts:

1. There's a orange cardboard name tag affixed to one of the branches. It says: JUSTIN. And so, JUSTIN, the next time you wish to randomly dispose of your detritus on someone else's property, get rid of the ID tag.

2. We're not actually going to hunt down JUSTIN to find out why he/she catapulted their Tannenbaum into our yard like a Kim Jong Un warhead that North Korea still makes even though they promised our president otherwise. New London's tree pick-up happens in the next several days, and as such, the eyesore will be gone. No thanks to JUSTIN.

3. There's also old-fashioned kite twine strung through the tree's skeletal limbs. Is it possible the tree was being carted to a dump on top of the JUSTIN-MOBILE, fastened to the roof by the twine? And possibly the twine snapped, freeing the tree to bounce onto the street?

4. If so, then why wouldn't JUSTIN, upon getting to his destination and discovering the tree had vanished, backtrack and find it — just as a courtesy. You know, so no school bus or ambulance or whatever hits the tree, somersaults and erupts in hell-balls of flame.

5. Wait! What if the twine wasn't a fasterner but part of the actual JUSTIN decorations?! Festoon the tree with twine, empty beer cans, chewed toothpicks, and nudie photos snipped from Hustler! Festive!

6. Hey, JUSTIN? Can't wait to see our yard after Easter. You going to leave us a dead hare and a satchel of rotting hardboiled eggs?