It's The Season ('Tis Is So Two Weeks Ago)

This is such an awkwardly funereal time, these few days -- not after Christmas -- but after it finally has to be over.

I drive to the dump and there's a mountain of Christmas trees, still green from the owners who teased them with water that they were actually going to live inside their living rooms.

There's no good way to get rid of a Christmas tree. No way that isn't unceremonious given everything that you had made them out to be. We can say we're "recycling" them. I choose to burn them, at night, almost in effigy as if they were personified.

We treasure these living things. We're willing to have them inside our homes in spite of the fact that they could help our homes burn down. We water them. String electric lights around them. Put stuff under them. Smell them. Write songs about them.

"Oh, Christmas tree ... Oh, Christmas tree ..."

They're dying from the moment we cut them from the ground, which happens to be the same moment we take notice of them.

Yeah, nobody wants to hear about Christmas. If you look at it in terms of the Earth revolving its way toward another winter solstice light festival, we're about as far away from Christmas as we can be.

We'd rather hear about Christmas in July than Christmas a week after we tear open presents to show how much Jesus loves us.

As I unwound my Christmas lights from the porch today, it struck me as interesting how we put an end to things.

It struck me as interesting that I might not know whether someone with their lights still strung is a lazy, low-class redneck or whether that person is theologically aware that the Christmas season, by strict definition, begins on Christmas and ends 12 days later.

(I guess that's all in the timing. You can't know for sure until summertime, "they" say).

It's something we all do together. And we disagree less with when we start it than when we end it.

I particularly enjoy the time after Christmas until New Year's when there's still snowflakes and college marching-band holiday music on Sportscenter. That has a little to do with being on vacation, but more to do with having an opportunity to enjoy what you couldn't enjoy because you were so ... anxious.

In any case, I suppose it has to end somehow.

And I think you know Christmas and everything that goes with it is over when there's only one carton of egg nog left in the grocery store and it expires on Monday.