Ah, the holidays. The time for gifts, feasts, decorations, family togetherness – and long, awkward silences around the tree or the dinner table.

You know the silences I mean. The kind that ensue when Uncle Claude leans back in his chair and says, "All right, how many of you are behind in your mortgage payments?"

Or when your husband's second cousin finishes a long speech about how the president-elect is really a Muslim, even if nobody wants to say so, and why is that, anyway.

Or when your morbidly obese niece – the one with the purple hair and the nose rings – asks who wants to see the tattoo her boyfriend gave her as an early Christmas present right before he got hauled back to prison for violating his parole.

At moments like that, you need something to talk about in a hurry. And this year there's a tempting topic right at hand: The mess the state is in.

Just look at the past week. The state pulled the plug on a wide variety of construction projects; Democrats in the Legislature passed a budget based on a set of tax maneuvers that its lawyer told them were legal; Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger killed that budget because, well, because he didn't like it; legislators had a Perry Como moment and decided there's no place like home for the holidays, prompting the governor to call them back to Sacramento.

When one of those awkward silences descends on your holiday gathering, it will be tempting to launch into a diatribe about the Legislature, or the governor, or the failures of politicians in general. But I have different topic to suggest for such a moment: Talk about what kind of place you want California to be.

That subject wouldn't naturally come up in a holiday setting, but it's something Californians need to talk about if they want to improve the situation inside the Capitol.

The gridlock there didn't happen by accident. It happened because of choices that Californians made – choices about whom to elect, choices about what taxes they want to pay, choices about how they want those taxes to be used.

And while there was a lot of commotion surrounding those choices – initiative campaigns, a recall election, heated debate in legislative chambers – there wasn't much conversation among Californians about what kind of state they were creating. They talked about what they wanted.

Lower property taxes? Gimme some of that.

A governor who will give my union a nice contract? Yeah, I want that.

Keep criminals in jail until they rot? Sounds good; I want it.

A new governor who is an international action hero? Cool! And kill the car tax while you're at it.

Things would be different, I think, if Californians talked about choices like these in terms of what kind of state they want to live in. Then the conversation would be about choices and trade-offs: Trade low property taxes for more state control of local schools? Keep criminals locked up at the price of less support for universities? Dump the car tax and put a permanent hole in the state budget?

Does the way people talk about things matter? You bet. Those conversations are the bedrock of political discourse, which is to say of politics. If conversations about state politics are shallow, state politics will be, too. If those conversations involve real discussions about difficult choices, state politics will, too.

So when the silence grows unbearably awkward this holiday season, give my suggestion a try. What do you have to lose? It's got to be better than taking a look at that tattoo.