Tinsel trees and glass ornaments in ninety-degree heat, under a tent the size of a barn.

Round Top does not do things by halves. The fields fill for a few weeks and then empty again, and for those weeks it is the strangest, best market in the country.

One tent was entirely vintage Christmas — aluminum trees, boxes of mercury glass, a rotating color wheel from 1961 that still turns. In July. In Texas.

I bought a box of ornaments wrapped in newspaper from a town that no longer prints a paper.

Sometimes the long way around is the point.