I have given in and had the snow tires put on. Much as I would like to believe that the weather will continue as unseasonably warm as it has been, we're bound to get winter sooner or later. The roads are clear and dry now and I can feel my tires' metal studs wearing down as I drive. It almost makes me wish for snow. Almost, but not quite.
When I was very young and lived on the way out country dirt road, we would always speak of the paved road at the bottom of the hill as "the state road." I wouldn't have been able to think of the route number off the top of my head, but recognized it when somebody else identified it that way. The reminder was Club 29, a bar with a pretty-colored neon sign that I passed every day on the school bus. As I recall, it was almost next door to the Catholic church. In hamlets, that's the way things are: everything is cheek by jowl with everything else.
Now once again I live on a way out country dirt road and my travel is mostly on or near or across two-lane paved state routes. The roads have names, but the names change as you travel along from hamlet to hamlet, so in conversation, everybody uses the route numbers to identify locations. "Up (or down) 145...", "...over on 443," "Down 30...", "Y'go over 7, up 145 to 10, follow 10 to 162, turn on 165..." Maybe somebody should devise a game, something between Bingo and Uncle Wiggily, just for the local denizens . . . sales of it could be a fund raiser for flood relief. 
Somebody sent me an email two days ago with a link to an evil little song discouraging Christmas shopping in non-Christian establishments. The issues I have with the song are many. I deplore the Us and/versus Them premise, but the thing that really pisses me off is that the lyrics indicate a certain willful ignorance. The last lines of the song, "Now let's see, if not for Christ's nativity . . . " there would be no Christmas tree, no dolls and trains that Santa brings, no mistletoe, no this, no that, etc.
I am no religious scholar, but I'm pretty sure that Christianity made use of existing traditions as it moved up into and around Europe. I love Christmas lights' colors as much as I loved that neon Club 29 sign . . . but I think pretty flashing Christmas lights out in the snow don't necessarily have a lot to do with the sacred birth of Messiah. So if I'm going out to buy multi-color lights to celebrate the Savior's birth I guess, if I wanted to, I could buy them from a Jew or a Muslim or whoever offers the best price, and not have my eternal salvation suffer from the transaction.
You know . . . what if your Christmas lights aren't actually "out in the snow"? The people who live where there isn't snow in December had better be a little watchful about their celebration habits, or the American Christian Life United folks might be knocking on their doors.
To tell the truth, the first thing that set me off, as I watched the youtube video, was the line that included, "...tryna sell..."
Tryna?
Is that shorthand for "trying to"?
Whenever you want to raise the rabble, the first step seems to be to dumb it down reeeallll good, so that those who are ruled by emotion rather than any intellectual discipline can say, "They're jes' like us'ns!"
We will now return you to your regular winter holiday celebration programming, whatever it may be.