Is it time to decorate yet?  For Christmas I mean.  Signs point mainly to yes I say.  Only please girls and boys, take the pumpkins off your porch first.  Remove the scarecrow from your mailbox also.  And don’t forget to take down your pilgrim flag either.

That’s better.  Clean the slate!  In my neighborhood, there is a week or so of blending of holiday decorations.  I don’t mind it really, it’s even kind of funny.  It’s very easy to see how it can happen.  Folks get busy.  Holidays creep up quickly.  Kids on school holiday.  Suddenly, Halloween is over,  Thanksgiving amounts to leftovers, and yet, suddenly, there are flashing lights across the street, welcoming yet another holiday season.  Already?

I’m ready.  I’m just not that ready yet.  We haven’t even made it through our Halloween candy around here.  I admit to buying candy canes when I know good and well I’ve got oodles of candy corn still in my pantry.  And our Thanksgiving turkey?  Yep - still have plenty of that also.  The meals ahead will no doubt include some manner of turkey infused soup,  sheppards pie, casserole, etc.  But that’s the holidays, right?

Now that it’s ‘officially’ the season, we can ‘officially’ begin to decorate.  It’s long been an unwritten rule around here that ‘we can’t decorate for Christmas until after Thanksgiving because it’s just not fair to the pilgrims!’  Fine.  Bring it on.  Though when it comes to decorating, our oldest becomes a sergeant/coach on the order of lining up troops on Super Bowl Sunday.  We can’t just toss a couple of strands on the bushes.  Oh have mercy, no.  It’s color galore outside around here.  The more color, the better.  Lights on the branches of the tallest trees, color snaking along the bushes surrounding the porch, and more colored lights on the porch, on the railings, and everywhere in between.  Every year our Christmas decorating obsessed oldest daughter somehow gets the rest of us marching to her decorating beat, draping lights under her direction, from sun up, ‘til sun down, and usually into the next day or days depending.  Never mind that many of our neighbors subscribe to the understated and lovely, classic and demure, tiny white light decoration aesthetic.  Our house needs to be gonzo color overload.  Like Rio on New Years.  If they flash, all the better!  Who cares if they don’t really match, if they clash even?  Not our big hearted decorating Christmas elf Buddy!  Long after our younger daughters tire of decorating bootcamp, Buddy, in her Santa hat to boot, is snaking the last of the bright lights along some unobscured path.  Time and again, long after dark, she calls the rest of us back outside, all the way to the street, so we can observe the ‘show.’ 

It’s magical, and worth it,  And tacky, and big and bold and bright.  And that’s the holidays really.  That whole big spirit.  The unabashed over the top who cares if it’s tacky display.  We’re not on the tacky lights tour, and I’m fine with that.  But on our street, thanks to Buddy, yeah maybe.

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