The man who qualified his promise to serve for only two terms by saying he meant, “this millennium,” has just announced that, in Boston at least, the new millennium will be arriving five hours early.

There are some who think this change is a holdover from the city’s Puritan heritage.  Others, noting  Boston’s reputation for besotted revelry, treat it as an opportunity to start drinking five hours sooner.

They’re wrong.  Tom Menino is not a man beholden to either blue noses or red noses.  He’s not Cotton Mather.  He’s not Norm Peterson. He’s Albert Einstein. Like Einstein, he understands that time is relative.  Like Einstein, he has taken a bold step forward in freeing mankind (or at least Bostonians) from being slave to the inexorable ticking of the clock.

For by saying that five hours doesn’t matter, the Mayor is saying that time itself does not matter. The man who solved the crime problem and fixed our schools has now single-handedly conquered time itself.   The possibilities are endless.

Next on the Mayor’s list should be every parent’s most dreaded holiday - Christmas. It’s time to get rid of this Santa-comes-at-midnight thing.  Christmas should be a school day.  Santa comes while the kids are at school.  They come home at 3:00 PM, open the presents, have a decent dinner and go off to bed on time.  No more late nights with Dad cursing at directions written in India and translated into English by the Japanese manufacturer.  No more panicked moments with Mom desperately looking by flashlight for that missing bag from Toys-R-Us. No more 4:00 AM screams of, “He came! He came!”

This is the kind of thinking that gets a guy three terms.

The Mayor needs to appoint a special commission to examine all of the holidays. There’s lots of problems.  Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Kawanzaa, Christmas and New Years are all bunched together within 40 days.  Meanwhile, there’s other times of the year where we don’t have any holidays at all.  We should spread them around, say one every month.  Any leftovers should be tucked into the first week of August, a good week for everyone to take off.

And then, of course, there are those Monday holidays.  The geniuses who run the federal government, perhaps the Mayor’s inspiration, have made sure that most of the holidays fall on a Monday.  But there’s still a pesky few - Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Fourth of July - who just won’t get with the program.  Take the Fourth, for example.  It should be on a Monday with  fireworks shot off at noon so that people can get to work on time the next morning.

I know your objections.  Celebrate the Fourth on a Monday and it might really be the 5th or the 3rd or whatever.  It is, after all, the Fourth of July.

That’s the genius of this Mayor.  We’ll still celebrate it on the 4th.  We’ll just make June longer, add on a few days, so that July 4th falls on a Monday.

Still, you say, fireworks at noon?  No one will be able to see them.

Ah, you underestimate the power of this Mayor.  This is the man who made the millennium arrive early.  Darkness at noon should be no problem.

Three terms isn’t enough.  Four!  Five!  You know that Mayoral election coming up in 2001?  Oh, we’ll still hold it in “2001.”  But there shouldn’t be any rush.  How about pushing it back, say a decade or so?