Today is a day of low clouds and a particular kind of mourning. I am taking down the Christmas lights, and it feels for all the world like I’m being asked to peel the posters of my childhood right off the bedroom wall, leaving nothing but the ghosts of tape and a cold, bare space. I love Christmas with a desperate kind of devotion, the kind that doesn’t want to let go of the light when the January gray starts creeping in.

Across the street, my neighbor has a yard that looks like a carnival exploded in a fit of joy. It’s a holy bramble of electricity and nylon. People come from three counties over, crawling by in their minivans, windows rolled down and taking pictures of the animatronic reindeer and the plastic Santas that hum with the breath of electric fans.

I’ll give you that during the day they all lay there like it’s a North Pole crime scene but at night it comes alive in neon glory!

Now, my wife is a woman of steady faith and quiet taste. She believes the season belongs to the Christ child, and so our front lawn is a dignified affair. We have the stable, the lowing cattle, and the silent, Savior. It is beautiful, and it is still. There are no moving parts. There is no neon. There is Jesus. And the plain, hard truth of the matter is that the world hasn’t seen fit to manufacture an inflatable Baby Jesus. It’s a hole in the American market, a gap in the supply chain of our spirits. For years, I’ve lobbied for something with a little more… motion. Something that might wave at a passing car.

The only moving part on my lawn is I, personally, move the wise men towards the stable every day. By the time they reach the basketball net, you know Christmas is close.

But my wife stood her ground, as firm as a cedar fence post: “There will be no inflatables on our front lawn.”

But my children, they know my heart. Last year for Christmas, they handed me a box that held a giant, bulging dinosaur wearing a Santa hat. The card was a legal disclaimer: For the back yard.

Now, because her precious children did this she thought it funny. If I’d done it, it probably would go right up there with the time I made the Halloween scarecrow out of my good suit. Some of you who live within ten miles of me might’ve heard the fallout from that one.

But anyway, this season, the kids, true to their word, blew up the dinosaur and staked him down behind the house. There he sat. In the middle of my backyard, a solitary prehistoric figure illuminated by Christmas joy.

Now, we live on a circle, a bend in the road that offers no secrets, and when you round that curve, there he is—a prehistoric beast glowing with an internal, electric fire, wearing the cap of old St. Nick. The neighbors look. They squint. They ask questions that don’t have easy answers. Did it blow back there? Didn’t dinosaurs exist before Christ?

It’s a conversation starter, I suppose. But mostly, it’s just a way to keep a little bit of the wonder tethered to the earth, even if it’s got scales and a long, glowing neck.

I think it’s in Psalms, “Praise the LORD from the earth, you sea monsters and all the deeps of the sea.” If all creation sings His praise, maybe a dinosaur in my backyard can too.

I don’t think my wife will be convinced.