Bare pots of dirt: that’s my preferred symbol this Advent. Bare trees, dead leaves, winter stillness. It occurred to me the other day, stopping and starting in dense holiday traffic, that we could opt out of Christmas completely. Some people do. We could just skip it. With that thought, I felt a momentary lift of freedom—which exposes all the cultural pressure to clutter our lives with Christmas crap as the ridiculous burden it is.