When is Less More?  Just about every time.  The tricky part is - when do you learn enough to feel it?  My first chance was an encounter with rock candy, at age four.  I guess I could look up the recipe on line, but I think I'll give you the impressions those memories left on me.  The slurry solution in the big pot obviously had some goody in it.  But you couldn't see it.  It just looked like hot water, steaming on top of a wood fired, iron stove.  The home was tiny and very simple.  No indoor bathroom.  It was 1960 or so.  I think we hung a string or something in the middle of the pot and just waited.  Crystals formed and grew.  They were IceCapade beautiful and as sweet as sugar cane.  And all out of nowhere.  I remember my focus being enhanced by the absence of 'store-bought' candy in that house.  I didn't know it then, but just a few pretty wrappers and I would have missed the whole show.
    My second shot at this anti-western reality (less is more) came in 9th grade Science.  Bell jars have an authentic old style lab appeal with their thick glass dome and heavy black base.  Remember the balloon trick?  You fill a balloon to about the size of a goose egg, tie it off and put it in the Bell jar.  The teacher would ask how you could make the balloon bigger without untiing it, or even taking it out of the jar.  And in public school, in 9th grade, magic didn't seem reasonable.  (We were decades before Harry Potter.)  Then she turned on the vacuum pump.  The air that was inside the jar, but outside the balloon came out the little tube in the base.  That's all it took to make the balloon bigger.  It wasn't more air in the balloon, it was less obstructive pressure around the outside.  And it was no illusion.  That balloon was indeed bigger.  In fact, it filled the jar.  Cool.
    My reminder came this week when a friend told me his household was going to have a Rock Candy Christmas in 2008, thanks to the wacko economy.  He went on to say it would be considerably smaller.
    I wonder . . . could this economy enhance our culture to gather a sweet crystallized Christmas on the simple string of now?  OR - could it even stage a Bell jar effect in our Spitits?  But instead of a balloon in the center, the Cross gets bigger when you vacuum out all the invisible, obstructive pressure Stuff.  That might be a Bigger Christmas than I've had in several Market Cycles.