Since 1983 I have invited the community to a personal outdoor ritual in the middle of the winter after the Twelve Days of Stockpiling (Christmas). It’s cold. This annual community ceremony is set in magnificent Provincetown Harbor on January 7, a purging of political and personal distress from the past year.

This post-consumption, environmental ritual commenced when I created a forest of discarded Christmas trees at the Provincetown Dump. It is sponsored by the IRS, the International Re-Rooters Society, with the artist as CEO. Its mission: to reconnect, to “re-root” us to the earth.

Each ceremony is accompanied by a hot button political theme (1999’s “Sports Futility Vehicles”; 2013’s “Pistol Cliff”). I officiate at the ceremony with song, ranting, and a call and response structure that mimics many religious practices. The rite concludes with the dramatic burning of a discarded Christmas tree on a makeshift boat, sent out into the harbor at sunset.