Hey, anything for a little enlightenment, especially this time of year. I'm rarely on top of my game around Christmas, since I'm neither a Christian nor adept at gift selection. And with the Huckster-in-Chief exhorting us to get out there and shop 'til we drop for God and country, I've been even less eager than usual to give a friendly Yuletide squeeze to the twin sugar titties of capitalism's favorite solstice streetwalker.

  This could have something to do with the semirural nature of our life here on Mount Dog, which renders us largely blind and deaf to the annual Christmas carnival. We have satellite TV, but no network channels, so we are spared the likes of "Barbie In The Nutcracker." Plus I quit watching CNN once it became apparent that the network had become the 24-hour electronic Josef Goebbels of the Lone Star Reich, peddling more propaganda than news in the 30-second intervals between ads for Jeep Libertys, debt-consolidation schemes and Bowflex pec-erectors.

  As for our local weekly newspaper, it's mostly good for finding out which one of your neighbors is in the hoosegow for DUI, and the regional dailies are even less useful, so we do without them unless we're short of those wax-and-sawdust fire starters.

  And the only radio I listen to is the stridently non-commercial National Public Radio, which takes some doing; while driving from Dog Manor to Colorado Springs for a burger and beer at Jack Quinn's, I have to change channels four times—from 95.7 to 88.5 to 91.5 to 105.7 and back to 91.5—to keep KRCC coming in loud and clear. The only preacher you hear regularly on KRCC is the Rev. Billy C. Wirtz, and even an apprentice Zen Buddhist can get behind "Mennonite Surf Party."

  Are You A Druid, Or Is That Just A Big Woody? Then there's the racial-memory thing. As an Irish-American, who surely must count a shower of druids in his ancestral woodpile, I'm kind of dubious about the notion of cutting down a live tree as the brief centerpiece of an alien ritual that displaced my Celtic forebears' pagan faith (though I don't seem to have the same issues with stuffing a few cords of dead ones into the stove when the temperature dips below freezing).

  We didn't have a tree at all last year, settling instead for a poinsettia, and I was all for that again this time around—especially since that plant is still alive and already in the house—until Herself spake otherwise.

  Now, we are not short of trees, having 40-some-odd acres of piñon, juniper, spruce and pine from which to choose, and there was a real beauty, a Christmas-card pinup pine, just over the ridge from our house. But it was all by itself on an otherwise-bare outcropping of granite, and looked capable of growing into something that even Dubya would feel bad about dropping a daisy-cutter on, so I insisted that we look for an alternative in a more crowded location, where its extraction would not leave such a gaping hole.

  Oy, Tannenbaum. Trouble is, Rancho del Perro Loco stands mostly on end. Hell, if God or Allah or whoever ironed the sonofabitch out flat, it would probably be the size of Utah, but with fewer Mormons, cycling journalists and Olympic venues, and a damn' sight more Guinness and whisky. So we spent the better part of quite some time marching up one steep pitch and down another, occasionally straying onto absent neighbors' acreage, waiting for the proper tree to present itself in our wandering path.

  By the time it did, we were a stone's throw from the county road, more than 400 vertical feet downhill from our house. And when we'd dropped it, hauled it to the road, walked the mile back up to the house, fired up the Vomit Comet, driven down the hill, hefted the tree into the bed, motored back up the hill, and trimmed it enough to get it in the door and into a stand, I had decided to become a Zen Buddhist.