'TIS THE SEASON. Well, I'm in for it now. Thanksgiving is over, so the Christmas season has begun. When did we go from Christmas day to Christmas season? It must have been when malls were invented. I cannot get away from it now. We sang Christmas songs in Sunday School. The preacher said he would preach Christmas sermons from now until Christmas. My anal retentive, engineer (is that redundant?) neighbor has already put out 10,000 lights, moving my family to say "when will we have lights?" This happens every year.

I think his yard looks like one of those carnivals that comes to your supermarket parking lot if you live in a bad part of town. You know the one, where the rides all look like death traps and the workers all look like pedophiles. If he would just put a guy in his driveway in a greasy t-shirt with a roll of paper tickets, I would be convinced.

You know that, even when Christ was actually born, as opposed to celebrated, God only put the one star up in advance. The rest of the stuff he did not even do until the actual day of his birth. Then, only a few guys got to see it. Remember the shepherds abiding in the field? They were the only ones to see the angels. The wise men got the star. For everyone else, well, they got nothing.

But now, everyone has lights on their house and bushes. They have "yard art", Santas, reindeer, trains, and wreaths. Wreaths are big at Christmas. Now there are lighted ones. The electric company must have a hand in all this. Then there is the guy that puts the big "TCU" sign on his house, lighted, at Christmas. All he wants for Christmas is a BCS bowl bid.

All this is bad enough. But today, driving to church, I caught myself humming a Christmas hymn. I slapped myself and turned the radio on to a jazz station. I was hoping for "Grazin' In The Grass". I got "Santa Baby".

Please, somebody help me.