1008: The Most Beautiful Tree Must Die

I've always wanted to get a real Christmas tree some year just to say I've had one. I hear they are difficult to deal with and that's the main reason I've never gotten one. I do think that it's too bad that we don't get to see Brutus chop his wife and son into small bits with the axe but that's what happens when you reduce the size of a Sunday comic strip by 75-85% over the last 100 years or so.

What's Wilberforce doing in the last panel? Some kind of weird force field-type thing?