Holiday Countdown

Clear away the Halloween cobwebs. A galaxy of shelf space is needed for an even weirder holiday ritual now in its blast-off phase.

A space traveler alights somewhere on something that looks like a 120-mile crab claw jutting into the Atlantic. Flat to begin with, it is almost entirely covered with a blackish-gray surface, which makes landing the spacecraft pretty easy.

What does the alien observe? Life forms dancing with six-foot tubes of colorful paper as they exit what appear to be storage structures. Hunters stalking items of questionable usefulness and then waving plastic rectangles - weapons? tools? - in the faces of others. Gatherers strapping prickly, apparently inedible plants on top of machines that move on circular legs. An increasingly confusing array of faux stars and other light sources, all within the Earth's troposphere - and warnings of an even stranger navigational hazard on Dec. 24.

Scratching its pate, the alien goes back to the spaceship, releases the parking brake, and lifts off. Back on Earth, meanwhile, the countdown has just begun.