Christmas is right around the corner, and there’s garland and tinsel all over the place. Red and green decorations started showing up right after the Fourth of July, and now that Thanksgiving’s almost here, we’re in full-speed-ahead Christmas mode.

That includes playing Christmas music round the clock. I’m one of those dorky people who love Christmas music, but I stopped the other day and listened to the lyrics instead of the melody.

Just hear those sleigh bells jingling… wait… I don’t even know what a sleigh bell is. I’ve seen pictures because I love movies from the 1940s, but I haven’t a clue what jingle bells, silver bells or sleigh bells really are.

Same with city sidewalks covered with snow. I grew up in upstate New York, so I understand what snow looks like on a sidewalk – it looks like a slip-and-slide ready to happen to the next poor sap who walks a little too fast.

It’s also a little hard for me to picture a red-nosed reindeer pulling a sleigh. The only reindeer I’ve seen have been in the zoo because, in Texas, anything as big as a reindeer would have a saddle on it in less than two minutes.

For most of us, a winter wonderland is glancing at the neighbor’s yard with at least 25 wooden yard signs, all illuminated by a flood light, and at least one University of Texas wooden cutout with a fake wreath around Bevo’s neck.

We don’t roast chestnuts around an open fire in the South. We roast marshmallows and make S’Mores or we stick a hot dog on the end of a wire coat hanger, wave it over a back-yard campfire and call the charred Oscar Mayer wiener dinner.

We don’t have white Christmases and the closest we Southerners will get to a white holiday is if somebody toilet papers our house.

We hang our Christmas stockings on the fireplace, but it’s a fake fireplace because very few of us need a roaring fire in the winter when the temperature’s a constant 80 degrees.

Frosty might go frolicking through the square, right past the traffic cop, but not in the South and especially not in the growing suburbs we have in Fort Bend County.

A snowman doesn’t have a chance in, well, you know where, of making it across Highway 6 and Williams Trace unless he’s surrounded by 2,000 pounds of steel.

And speaking of hot temperatures, it’s the end of November and I’m running the air conditioner while I’m still comfortably wearing shorts and sandals. I see thermal underwear and woolen mittens in the stores, and I wonder who’s going to spend that kind of money for the one or two weeks when the temperature dips below 50 degrees.

Even though Christmas songs were written with snow, icicles, snowmen and parkas in mind, we Southerners have our own way of celebrating the holidays, and our traditions are some of the best.

There’s the big pots of chicken and sausage gumbo simmering on the stove on Christmas Eve, the tradition of making tamales and pecan cookies in the days leading up to Christmas and making sure we eat ham and black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day to ensure good luck for the coming year.

So keep the snow. Keep the sleigh bells. Keep the woolen mittens. We’ve got riding bikes on Christmas Day in a T-shirt, reading the “Cajun Night Before Christmas” before tucking the little ones in to wait for Santa, and the smug knowledge that when the jolly old elf comes cruising past the Mason-Dixon line, he’ll have the air conditioner on full blast in that sleigh of his.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.