I NEED TO SAY a few things about those rear-window car decals depicting stick-figure drawings of families. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you soon will. They are, according to one of the many websites that sell them, "all the rage" in Southern California. That's an apt description, because the next time I see one, I'm going to floor the accelerator and cross four lanes of traffic without checking my mirrors.

They also want us to know how very, very cheerful they are. Stick Family characters are nothing if not jubilant. They often have their arms outstretched and their feet at strange angles as if dancing to a "Partridge Family" song. The girls wear skirts, the boys wear short pants, and often family members' names appear underneath. Frequently pets are included. A friend of mine swears he saw one Stick Family that included the maid. When I said that sounded ridiculous, he asked how many families I knew named Mike, Karen, Sophie, Dylan and Juanita.

When I began seeing the decals, the conspiracy theorist in me assumed they were emblems of the conservative family-values crowd, sanctimonious pictographs that announced: "This is an intact family! No divorces, court-ordered payments or supervised visitations here!"

But on further investigation, I discovered that Stick Family decals are available in every imaginable incarnation. You can get them with two moms or two dads. You can get stick space aliens, stick people in wheelchairs, "Mr. Mom" stick dads, stick soccer moms and even stick "Goth girls" and something called "stick teen boy hip hop."

A Google search of "Stick Family" turns up dozens of places to order the decals, but the most official-seeming outfit is an Escondido-based design firm called Decalifornia. It's owned by graphic artist Janel Eaton, who's been in the sticker business for five years and began drawing Stick Families after a customer saw one on a car in the Midwest and wanted her own. Eaton told me she's done thousands of Stick Family decals (they account for more than half of her business), including a 4-foot-long sticker for a guy who wanted to be depicted as a cowboy surrounded by 23 different kinds of animals. She also, as it happens, did a sticker of a family made up of three moms and six kids.

OK, so I was wrong about the right-wing conspiracy. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to unleash the Grateful Dead dancing bears onto the Stick Families and witness the patchouli-soaked bloodbath.

Then again, I've always had a short fuse about things on the backs of cars. Bumper stickers, even if they support a political cause I agree with, usually just seem gratuitous. (Besides, if you're driving an old Volvo wagon, we already know you hate Bush.)