I'm dreaming of a tulip-filled Christmas

A few years ago, my wife Liz and I made one of our rare runs to the Maine Mall in South Portland right around Nov. 14 to bring a comatose computer to the Apple store. (It turns out laptops don't like having water dumped on them. Who knew?)

While Liz chatted with a staffer at the store, I sat out in the mall, trying to ignore the disconcerting sound of Jingle Bells and Silent Night on the public-address system. Here it was, about two weeks before Thanksgiving, and some ersatz celebration calling itself "Christmas" had been in full bloom for weeks.

We can't put an end to the madness. The holiday season gets longer and longer every year, as retailers try ever harder to get us to open our wallets early and often. So if we're stuck with this lunacy, why not embrace it? Let's just surrender to the gods of commercialism by inviting Alvin and his pesky friends to sing their little rodent hearts out all year long. Transforming the 12 days of Christmas into the 12 months of Christmas is the way to go.

Chestnuts are nowhere to be found these days and no one would know how to roast 'em even if we had 'em, so what the hell. Good King Wenceslas could just as easily look out on the feast of Valentine. A little kid who saw mommy kissing the Easter bunny would be a welcome change of pace. Maybe  a sting or two from the wasps of July will silence the little drummer boy for a while. As for me, I'm dreaming of a tulip-filled Christmas, just like the ones we soon will know.