Money roasting on an open fire. Bad news nipping at your nose. Blind optimism being sung by a choir. And folks as poor as Eskimos.

It’s not just the financial news, though, and the steamrolling depression that’s engulfed America. It just plain doesn’t feel like December.

Sure, there’s word that Americans have decreased their debt for the first time in history. Really. The first time ever that Americans’ total individual debt has gone down.

While that’s the headline, isn’t it more disturbing that debt is 25% of total American net worth? Or that while debt declined by 0.8%, net worth declined by 4.7%, meaning that debt functionally increased greatly as an overall portion of the bottom line? Who came up with this system, anyway? How did we get here?

This is not my beautiful house.

Maybe the problem is that I’m in California. Not just California where the newspaper ran a headline with the word “Armageddon” in it today about the state budget crisis. But a part of California where it never truly gets cold (or warm), where it never snows, where it never feels like anything except, as I’ve long described the weather here “a little crappy”. If I were somewhere where the weather artificially inflated my Christmas spirit, like Buffalo or something, then I might be all set. It’s like reverse-light therapy. Snow as savior.

But somehow, I think that would be hollow and artificial. I think I would just be writing a post about how I could physically see Christmas and it felt physically like Christmas, but the soul was missing. It’s like everyone woke up in August and said “Hey, let’s have Christmas now!” And because no one rejects suggestions by the right people or the right publicity, we just did it. And with none of the feeling or verve or resonance, we just put on the show, flew home, and went through the motions.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m delighted to go home for a vacation that I’ve been counting down by the half-day. And maybe Nuevo’s cold and luminarias will save my spirit.

You also shouldn’t get me wrong – this is far greater than my standard ambivalence about Christmas as a non-Christian and a non-child. Those categories both put a decent layer of resistance to the ol’ spirit around me, but I’ve become well accustomed to not being a Christian (15 years) and not being a child (what, 11 years, I guess?).

This is different.

I even, for the third straight Christmas, work in an agency positively obsessed with Christmas and the spirit. Everywhere, everyone is preparing for the next big holiday helping, be it food, toys, or fellowship. It’s all most anyone can talk about or think about.

And maybe it’s my extra removal from clients (and kids) this year over last, but I think there’s something deeper. Something deeper even than the bottom line of a nation on life support in a power outage. Deeper magic from before the dawn of time.

You know what they say about all winter and no Christmas. One-hundred years of winter and all that. We’re going to need an awfully big groundhog to turn this around.