What's an "authentic" Christmas celebration?

There would be something sort of troubling about a Wal-Mart-fueled Christmas in a German hamlet where the residents have been lighting up trees for centuries. But in Frisco, Texas, there are hardly any native trees, much less long-cherished traditions about how to decorate them.

Perhaps they could hang a single stand of lights hung on a scrubby mesquite tree in the middle of a windblown prairie. Except that there aren't any electrical outlets on the prairie. So you can see why the city's residents have built subdivisions and draped their town square in lights. Tammie is more right than she knows—and more legitimate than Stuever lets on—when she tells him, "We're makin' Christmas now!"

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