Return with me now to my small quiet office for another appointment with the Here and Now, with a smattering of There and Then: another client, another day in psychotherapeutic ways. It was another December in Chicago. Cold, but not snow.

My client’s toilet-bowl white teeth were as distracting as the halo surrounding his head from the light cast from the scene out the window behind him. When he closed his eyes, I looked over his shoulder at the attention-grabbing yellow-orange glow visible through my office window. An arresting conflagration of lights and forms, the nativity scene across the street brought to mind the Midway at the state fair in August—or a methodical bushfire. The difference was the temperature of the air and deficiency of sound. The combustion of colors and shapes currently in my line of sight was lordly silent in the cold air of the December night.

The display was an unbridled holiday flambé on the front lawn of an unpretentious, vacant-looking ranch style home. Given its visual clout, it got star billing on the street. It was a flaming, opulent frozen parade blending a religious opinion and a secular tradition. I found it chilling. It had gone up the day after Thanksgiving and would not come down till several weeks into January. All of December would be held hostage by its confused goals. Occasionally cars would slow as they passed to take a gander, undoubtedly creating impromptu discussions in heated autos.

The Christmas Midway was designed in concentric circles expanding like ripples from a stone dropped in still water. Frozen ripples. At the center was a nativity scene of life-size, fading, colored plastic figures illuminated from their interiors by lightbulbs. Mary and Joseph looked to be in need of a consultation for chronic fatigue syndrome. Around the nativity set was a circle of mini-lighted topiaries of reindeer with slowly bobbing heads, one in serious need of a chiropractor, another missing part of a leg. Around the deer was a circle of inner-illuminated, three-foot high, red-and-white striped plastic candy canes tied together with poinsettia-riddled plastic garlands. Standing guard around the canes was a circle of inner-illuminated four-foot high Babes in Toyland soldiers. Stationed in front of this no-holds-barred mix of the secular and religious was a life-size inflatable Santa Claus with a three-by-four foot plywood board leaning against him on the snowless ground. The board stated in black spray paint, “Baby Jesus missing. Please return.”