For some folks this day is all about shopping. In our house it is Decoration Day. There are almost as many decorating traditions as their are glowing lights on the Plaza. There are still some families, for example, who will wait until Christmas Eve and reveal everything the next morning. My mom always wanted us to wait until the church season of Advent started. Then, we used lots of blue lights, which is the color the Lutheran Church assigns to the season. Today, with this being the big shopping day it has become, blue lights all over your house may result in a bunch of people pushing carts and asking where the discounted deep fryers are located. In addition to the Blue Lights of Advent, we also kept the Lutheran tradition of decorating the tree with lefse, lutefisk and cups of coffee. It is a little known fact that a fourth Wise Man also visited Bethlehem and brought a tuna casserole. He was the Lutheran of the group.

I am aware of one married couple that rarely argued. They saved most of their acrimony for the day they picked out the tree and put up the lights. The first of many disagreements on that day had to do with which tree to select. They really could have used an accompanying arbitration panel or, perhaps, the ghost of Henry Clay. (He was called "The Great Compromiser" for coming up with the Missouri Compromise in the 1800s. I'm including this bit of history as a holiday gift to all my history teachers who were convinced that the only thing I'd learned in their classes was how to create the perfect spit-wad and fire it with amazing accuracy.) The tree was too big or too small or the needles were too long or too short or too green. That last problem is really indicative of a nit-pick. Eventually, they got through it all and the house would look great...once they touched up the paint where the tree-topping star had been thrown with laser-like intensity.

In our house, we have an artificial tree now due to allergies. But in the early years we did try the real tree route. I always had trouble getting the tree to stand straight in the stand. For some reason, we had a stand that really did not appear to understand it's job. It did everything possible not to stay level. It required a certain sense of balance to work properly, a combination of Feng Shui and nuclear physics. One year, in an effort to get the tree to look right, I kept lopping off the bottom. Eventually, our eight-foot tree stood at a regal 3'11". Came out to about twenty bucks a foot. Most of our ornaments dragged on the floor.

Then there were the years we'd put the tree in a playpen to keep little hands from helping themselves. Years ago, when my nephew was about two, he saw a beautiful blue glass ornament hanging on grandma's tree. He took it off, grabbed his new baseball bat and hammered a line drive straight at the piano. His eyes got huge as the blue bits of Christmas exploded all over the living room. We avoided those particular problems with the playpen. Truth be told, it wasn't just the kids we had to discourage. We have had a couple of occasions where the dog has eaten an ornament. One that got wolfed down was actually made of a MilkBone so that's understandable. But, another time, the dog ate a regular glass ornament. Now, that sounds like a recipe for disaster but this dog has an InSinkerator where his stomach belongs so it just went down and...uh...out. It gave a whole new meaning to the phrase Yule Log.

Because my wife has the patience of Job and the artistic eye of Michelangelo, I suspect our decorating will go just fine. The weather is warm for the outdoor stuff and the kids are plenty old enough to do their share. If I show up on FirstNews, Monday morning, leaning on crutches, with Einstein hair and babbling incoherently, it will be totally my fault.