The Christmas tree inspires a love/hate relationship. All that time spent selecting and decorating, and a week after, you see it by the side of the road, like a mob hit. A car slows down, a door opens and a tree rolls out. People snap out of Christmas spirit like it was a drunken stupor, "There's a tree inside the house! Throw it anywhere."

Seinfeld’s joke targets the abrupt emotional whiplash of the holiday season: intense care, expense, and sentimentality are poured into choosing and decorating a Christmas tree, only for that attachment to evaporate almost overnight. By likening discarded trees to victims of a “mob hit,” he exaggerates the indignity of post-holiday disposal to expose a broader consumer-cycle pattern—ritualized devotion followed by swift rejection once the social moment passes. The humor comes from treating a commonplace sight (trees on curbs) as evidence of a collective, almost guilty “snap” back to ordinary life, puncturing the idealized “Christmas spirit” with a blunt, practical impulse to get the mess out of the house.