Deck the Halls Fence...♪♫

Today I was planning on completing Completion Week #9, along with hanging Christmas lights and the cedar wreaths which line our front fence.

Well, it didn't happen as planned, but the whole afternoon got me to thinking about an irritant in my holiday contentment:

This past summer, somewhere in June or so, our local hobby store began removing aisles of lawn and garden things and replacing them with Christmas holiday things. They do this every year. Every year it makes me a wee bit crazy. It can be 105º outdoors and we're looking at snowglobes as we mop our sweaty brows.

I normally commence my holiday decorating a week or two after Thanksgiving. I know many many people just can't wait to get their trees and wreaths and Christmas cards up and out and mailed. But not me. Our family gets going with Christmas midway through December, and we keep our Christmas tree and trimmings up through Twelfth Night. (Look it up.) Therein lies a problem or two: Just as we are getting into the holiday spirit, other people (and stores) are packing away the holly and the ivy and moving on to red hearts and chocolates.

This weekend I went in to our local hobby store to peruse the hobby aisles, and I noticed that they have begun dismantling the Christmas aisles and replacing them with lawn and garden items.

OK - back to my afternoon: after a meager 14º start to the day, the temps rose enough that I felt nimble and ready to scamper up the ladder around our house to hang outdoor lights. I got the first line of lights up and things were going well. I went back indoors to check the next lengthy string of lights to make sure they functioned (I learned this exercise the hard way a few years ago, after I had hung all the lights and attached all to an electrical source, only to discover that some strings did not light up. That was a lousy lesson to go through!)

Sure enough, there were two long areas in the string which would not light up. And that got me to thinking about last year when I had to go to the local hobby store to buy a few new sets of lights, only to find that, mid-December, they had already packed the holiday stuff away.

Boo!! I mean, "Bah! Humbug!"

So tomorrow after the farrier's visit I will venture out to a few other stores (forget the hobby store!) and see if I can acquire some new lights.

.♪♫ ...It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas....♪♫