I’m reduced to stream-of-consciousness tonight, no ideas at all, so who knows what the harvest will be.

My Christmas tree is unlighted tonight. Yesterday was the Feast of the Epiphany, the last day of Christmas, so now I’m done. In the last few years I’ve moved from my parents’ Christmas tree tradition (in which you light it every night until New Year’s) to a church calendar approach, letting my little light(s) shine through January 6.

This is the worst time of the year, in my world. Up through Christmas, you’ve got the celebration and the lights to bear your spirits up. Now there’s just the Long March through Jan, Feb and Mar, and frequently Apr, and sometimes parts of May in Minnesota. The days are getting longer, it’s true, but the impotent winter sun has no effective influence, like a freshman Republican congressman.

Speaking of legislators, this winter is given added piquancy by the fact that it looks very much as if Al Franken is going to be my senator when all’s said and done. Wherever I surf in the conservative blogosphere, commentators are saying essentially the same thing—“What the h****? What are they smoking up in that state? Have I been transferred to some alternate universe where failed comedy writers with drug histories are presumed to Be In Touch With the Gods, and are therefore chosen as tribal elders, like peyote-addled Navajo medicine men?”

I’ve talked about the history of Minnesota liberalism in this space before (our Democratic party is officially called The Democratic Farmer-Labor Party), but it’s enough to say that most Minnesotans have liberal instincts and believe that Baby Jesus cries whenever a Republican vote is cast. Give them a Democratic landslide year, and they transform into lemmings (lemmings are a Norwegian animal, by the way. I saw one once). In that frame of mind, Minnesotans will (to quote Mitch Berg of Shot In the Dark) “elect a set of wind-up chattering teeth if the DFL nominated it.”

In Minnesota politics, you have to work pretty hard to achieve hyperbole.