I recently found out that the COVID-19 pandemic has prevented many suppliers of Christmas trees from Canada from selling across the border.

So now we have spruce thieves - individuals that illegally cut off spruce tops. They work late at night, and use fluorescent tape to mark their trails into the spruce swamps, so they don't get lost on the way out.

On any given night, two people in a 7- to 8-hour period can cut roughly 1,000 tops which can sell for as much as a dollar apiece to unlicensed buyers.