My wife and I have our conventional traditions. I drag our Christmas tree down from the attic so we can reassemble it and choose which ornaments see the light of day this year and which ones stay packed. She frees our Christmas dinnerware from the back of our kitchen cabinets. We send and gratefully receive Christmas cards. We watch a few Christmas specials. We avoid Christmas TV-movies. We look forward to Christmas Eve service at our church.

And then there’s our Christmas diorama, a time when geek and non-geek decorations gather ’round our Lord and Savior and celebrate the occasion in their own special ways, without any partisan courtroom squabbling to suck the spirit out of them.

A bit lost in the group photo in the upper-right is our Charlie Brown Christmas tree. I wish I could say we created this ourselves from discarded twigs, but it’s a catalog item given to us a few years ago. It looks accurate, but I’m disappointed it doesn’t shed needles every time we touch it.

The Jawas at lower-right were a rare Star Wars item my wife tracked down a while back. They’re a callback to the days when I used to collect Jawa toys. In our old apartment I had a veritable Jawa army waging year-round war atop our entertainment center. Ah, memories.

Latecomers to the party: the Peanuts gang, added after the above group shot was taken. We have metric tons’ worth of Peanuts Christmas merchandise because a certain relative imagines we wallow in it, like maybe every year in the backyard we set up a Peanuts Christmas thingamabob bin, fill it up with the last twenty years’ worth of items, and go Peanuts Christmas-diving in it. We do appreciate people thinking of us, but it is okay to diversify.

Meanwhile, all Ralphie’s family can do is stand and stare at poor Flick, because Snoopy and friends didn’t exist in their day. Their negative experiences with the Bumpuses’ dogs have also made them wary of pets, even those with vivid imaginations.

We also have a pair of wreaths that house our themed ornament collections. Rather than overwhelm the tree with our themes of choice, we decided long ago to let them secede from the rest of our ornaments and form tiny wreath-nations of their own, where they can gather in Christmas harmony without having to clash with the Simpsons, Pinky and the Brain, Harry Potter, and several interpretations of the Rudolph cast.

Wreath #1: my wife’s Star Wars collection, posed on a round celestial body that’s neither a moon nor a space station.

Wreath #2: the heroes of Marvel and DC. I’d love to see more representation from other comics companies, but Hallmark doesn’t talk much to Dark Horse, Image, BOOM!, IDW, or the rest. Such a shameful, narrow oversight.

We went another, more radical direction with the Christmas tree itself. More about that tomorrow. But these needed to be posted here and now because this site and I were desperately wanting for a touch of Christmas pizzazz.