These crazy Christmas ghosts are starting to drive me nuts. Just when I got settled in after last week's jaunt back to the Eisenhower era, I was rudely snatched up again by some screwball spirit decked out in holiday gift wrap with a big red bow on his head.

"Let me guess," I said. "You're Christmas Present."

"You're sharp as a tack and just as flat-headed," he said sarcastically. "So, have you changed your mind about Christmas?"

"Not really," I said. "I still think people who go around with 'Merry Christmas' on their lips should be confined somewhere appropriate, like a yuppie coffee shop or a fitness center."

With a disgusted sigh, he swooped me out of my warm cozy bed (again!) and deposited me in my living room with my wife playing Christmas music on the CD player.

Barb is one of those people for whom the Christmas season starts with the end of the Ephrata Fair in late September. She often can be found humming Christmas carols as she breaks out her endless array of rubber stamps and ink pads and begins custom making gift tags and Christmas cards.

She also likes to handcraft many of her presents. So, beginning in October, it's impossible to eat at our dining room table because it's covered with gift wrap, ribbons, tags, bows and other Yuletide hoop-de-doo.

•••

By Nov. 1, the case containing our Christmas music has been put in our car so we can be serenaded by Steve and Edie, Johnny Mathis, Elvis Presley and Bing Crosby, as well as my personal favorites, Porky Pig singing "Blue Christmas" and Bobby "Boris" Picket's "Monster's Holiday"

("The tree was all trimmed in ghoulish things, like werewolf fangs and vampire wings." — They don't write 'em like that anymore, thanks to modern medications.)

The Christmas music will remain in the car until February.

I've managed to maintain some holiday sanity by refusing to put the Christmas lights on our bushes until December.

Thankfully, one holiday tradition we no longer celebrate is the annual knocking over of the family Christmas tree.

Starting when our daughter Sarah was 2, someone always managed to topple our tree. The first few years, Sarah did it. One year I knocked it over while trying to plug in the lights.

The next year we were extra careful, but the cat knocked it over. A year later, one of Sarah's playmates sent it crashing to the floor.

We finally solved the problem by getting a tree so heavy Paul Bunyan couldn't fell it. Except now the cat climbs it.

This year, with Sarah married and gone, we've decided to put up just a small ceramic tree.

And we may never put one up again. At least not until the cat dies.

•••

But back to the spirit, who next took me to the annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Penn Square. There, I watched people shivering in temperatures cold enough to freeze their tubas off.

But instead of running for warmth as I wanted to do, they stood in clumps, singing Christmas carols through chattering teeth as Mayor Rick Gray pushed the button to light the tree. I felt bad for these people.

"Have they no refuge?" I implored of the spirit.

"Are there no yuppie coffee shops? Are there no fitness centers?" he mocked me, his words echoing painfully in my ears. "Are there no yuppie coffee shops? Are there no fitness centers?"

I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, the ghost was gone and I found myself a guest on the Jerry Springer show.

Forgive me, Spirit! Don't leave me here. …

lalexander@lnpnews.com