The definitive guide to monkey trees

Childhood is a funny thing.  Not everyone gets to wile away the days watching Space Jam and jumping on, off, around, and sometimes through, every playground you passed by.  For example, I assume that Torontonian children grow up in a concrete jungle devoid of foliage and fun, in a world that only changes when it's blanketed in 3 feet of soul crushing snow.

Although if you made snowmen like this, then you win.

Torontonians, don't organize an angry mob to hunt me down just yet.  I'm not arbitrarily picking on you, I'm doing this because one of your own doesn't understand monkey trees.  I know, terrible, eh?!  Now that we're on the same page Torontonians, I'd appreciate if you allowed me to outline monkey tree protocol.  Cool?  Cool.

If I wanted to pick on Toronto, I wouldn't stray from the bread and butter.

This is a monkey tree:

It is named as such for two reasons:  Firstly, its branches resemble a monkey tail (probably true).  Secondly, these trees are more tropical than the majority of trees found in urban areas; monkeys are more tropical animals than most city animals; ergo the two got associated (almost certainly not true).  In any case, it's called a monkey tree.  When one sees a monkey tree, if one is with another party, one may pinch the second party and say "Monkeys bite, can't bite the butcher back!"  (Monkey tree leaves are pointed and quite sharp, which I suppose could be construed as a bite.)  There's a one pinch per tree maximum, so be sure to get your pinch in quickly.

That's the only rule of monkey trees (it's not all that complicated Toronto, teach your children these things!), but I'll explain the mandatory phrase, because admittedly, when I first thought about it instead of just parroting it, it didn't make much sense.

"Monkeys bite, can't bite the butcher back!"  Yes, monkeys have teeth and can therefore bite.  But monkeys can't be butchers, silly children's saying, who ever heard of animals doing people things?

Except looking far more badass driving than you can ever hope to.

Okay, maybe I interpreted that wrong, let's try again:  Monkeys bite.  Fact.  Entirely unrelated to the second clause, I just wanted you to know for sure that monkeys are capable of using their jaws to clamp down upon an object...  And then your local butcher bites you, perhaps to just really drive home what the act of biting is.

Yeah, that doesn't make much sense either, unless we live in a world where the holders of one of the few occupations that involve using really sharp knives to cut up flesh also have a propensity to dine on human drumsticks, and I don't want to live in that world.  So let's try a third option to try to make sense of this saying: "Monkey's bite, can't bite the butcher back!"  Adding the apostrophe to make this a possessive finally yields some sense.  Some horrifying, gruesome sense.  What this implies is that you, the butcher, have beheaded a monkey that was just chilling out in his or her tree, and are now using it's probably still-bleeding head to bite your companion.  Because apparently everything about childhood rituals need to have a basis in death.  Yikes!