A doctor's office waiting room in Christmas week is sort of like a neighborhood bar in the afternoon. Mostly old men sitting alone, an atmosphere of durable despair, the haunted feeling that happiness and vigor surely exist but somewhere else, beyond the perimeter of death and wrinkled copies of Entertainment Weekly from July. The reception area had a few holiday touches, carefully secular and mild, just some green and red and a little glitter with a vague message of cheer. Not too much. You can't really go nuts with the holiday spirit in a medical environment, since for many people the mood is anything but spirited. How to acknowledge the season without cruelly twisting the knife in the diseased guts of the victims of fate? Here's your head x-ray, that's the tumor right there. Move over here to look at it, the blinking lights on the tree make the ominous shadow hard to see.