Just a coupla weeks till the birthday of Baby Jesus, and would you check out these shoes!

Two-tone, pal. Tan and navy. The navy part is suede. Bought 'em for $100 at a factory outlet mall in Wrentham, Mass., just 40 minutes from the post-industrial poverty pocket where I live.

I worked Columbus Day and Veterans Day for holiday overtime (God bless my union). I took that money and went to the outlets. A pair of shoes. Three Brooks Brothers shirts, all of them in severely understated Protestant plaids (I'm Catholic). A tweed vest from Ralph Lauren.

We were so happy there at the outlets, all of us. Though I gotta admit the Hispanic woman sweeping up cigarette butts looked a little dour.

So I shoulda given her the money I spent on the shoes, no? Jesus said sell it all and give it to the poor, right?

OK, so maybe the Hispanic lady sweeping up the butts isn't poor, not really. She's working.

Or I coulda stayed home, taken my overtime money and given it to Ricky, a street bum I know. Last time I saw him, he was in the liquor store buying three 24-ounce cans of very cheap beer and two of those little bottles of vodka they give you on airplanes. He was wearing a grime-sheened tan parka and a New England Patriots cap. He always wears the hat.

I slipped Ricky a buck that day and he went back into the store for another can of that 99-cents-a-pop off-brand beer.

"God bless you," he said to me.

"Good enough," I thought. "Good as the pope saying it."

Jesus said to sell all you have and give the money to the poor.

I often use that Jesus quote to bedevil my more severely born-again friends.

"You own a house?" I ask them."

"Yeah," they say.

"Jesus says to sell all you have and give the money to the poor," I say. "If you got a house, you're a suck Christian."

We invented Christmas for the same reason we invented church. It helps take our minds off Jesus and his hard, crazy road of giving and loving and forgiving — stuff nobody wants to do.

I'm not what a lot of people call a "guilty liberal." I face the poor every day because of where I live and because I'm a newspaper reporter and I know them for what they are — some bad, some good, some very nearly saints, some willing to stab you in the throat for a $6 bag of black tar heroin and many of them normal people with the money subtracted.

That overtime money I spent, it was mine — the word "mine" being the origin of nearly all the world's trouble.

I better get my tree up damn quick because, if I don't, I'm gonna stop thinking about Christmas and start thinking about Christ.

Which would ruin everything.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com