Ho ho not yet

Lightning at 3 am this morning. Thousand-one, thousand-two, thousand-three, thousand-four… after that, I knew the bolt was somewhere far from my property. Rumble. In the next few minutes, a few bolts were closer, but not really that close, and the sky opened up with rain. More like spring or summer than late fall or early winter.

I don’t usually mind waking up to a thunderstorm in the small hours. Like last night, I’m almost always able to return to sleep after it subsides, or maybe even sooner. In the meantime, there’s something primal about lying still and listening to a storm. At the same time, you can appreciate progress beyond the primal, namely the civilization that allowed your sturdy home to be built, and you to occupy it on stormy nights.

Took a drive this evening, noting the proliferation of Christmas lights over the weekend. The simplest display I saw was two outdoor lights on either side of a garage, one green, the other red. I liked that. Decorate for Christmas in 60 seconds or less! The most elaborate had thousands of lights, animatronic elves, live reindeer tethered to candy-cane poles, and a third-string actor dressed up as Santa (Howard Hesseman, I think).

Well, maybe not quite that elaborate. But at least, and this is purely my observation—the season is young—there don’t seem to be as many inflatables as in the last few years. The only one I ever saw that I liked was an inflatable Homer Simpson dressed as Santa.

We even passed by a tree, all decked up, in a window. It’s still too soon for all this. Merchants do their best to advance the Christmas season into November, but there’s no reason other people need to help them. Christmas is entirely too front-loaded as it is. If the season begins sometime around Thanksgiving (Halloween, if Hallmark et al. had their way), then it’s pretty much out of gas by December 26. Instead of fading away slowly in the languid days between Christmas Day and New Year’s, the holiday shuts off like a tap.