I love the holiday season.

It’s the annoying traditions of the holiday season that I can do without.

Traditions that come back to me like bad fish.

I'm not talking about the tradition of having to trudge through the cold and snow in search of the perfect tree. Or the tradition of having no choice but to listen to really bad holiday songs and having to come up with the gift that won't disappoint.

I really like those traditions.

No, the tradition that keeps on giving me agita begins just about the time we throw out what's left of the Thanksgiving leftovers and dump the moldy pumpkins in the woods.

It's when I carefully bring down from the attic the boxes filled with the outside decorations, the inside ornaments and the lights for the tree that make our season bright. In theory.

In reality, they don’t.

But let me jump ahead a few weeks when everything does work.

It's Christmastime. All the lights shine without fail. The big flashing colors that wrap around the wreaths, the steady string of solid whites that adorn the tree and the bright yellow glow from the star at the top.

An illuminating masterpiece that brings a tear to my wife's eyes as she considers what this will do to our electric bill — and I'm sure a smile to the folks at Central Hudson Gas & Electric who wonder why the season of lights can't last year-round.

But like all good things, the holiday comes to an end. In January I unplugged the lights. I can't emphasize enough that at this point, they ALL work. Then I start to take down the decorations. All the decorations. Very carefully. Nothing is missing.

Into the well-labeled boxes the lights and decorations go, packed up and put away in the safe confines of our attic for the next 11 months.

They will not be touched again by human hands until I, and I alone, allow the boxes to exit the attic.

Yet somehow, someway, in an act that would stupefy Houdini, the lights and decorations, while never leaving the comfort of their boxes in our attic, get misplaced, mishandled, and mistreated.

My working thesis is that this is done by the ghosts of Christmas past.

I’m not married to this theory.

Regardless of how it happens, the result is that when I start unpacking in December, a good many of these decorations can't be found and a good many of the lights don't seem to work.

I can set my watch to this tradition. I can do that because I didn't pack my watch with the decorations. Otherwise, it would either be broken or missing.

I spent a good part of last Sunday searching for the star for our tree.

I knew I had packed it in the box that said "tree lights." I found all the other tree lights, but no tree star. Not until hours later, when I unpacked the "holiday tins" box. By that point, I had gone out to buy a new star and more lights to replace those that somehow died in the box. Again.

Bonnie says this might be a case of attention deficit, suggesting that by the time January rolls around, I've got my eye on the TV watching football instead of how and where I'm putting away the decorations, that I should be paying a bit more attention to packaging.

It should be noted that my wife has that same theory about why the leaves remain on our lawn in the fall, the steps never get shoveled in the winter and I'm unable to form a complete sentence unless I include the phrase, "Are the Jets ever going to get a quarterback who can throw?"

Missing and broken decorations and a missing and broken quarterback. OK, so I've got two holiday traditions I can do without.