Get Your Ho Ho Ho On Now

Considerably colder today, but I like to think of it as like a warm day in January. As if on cue, yellow & red leaves have appeared this week all along the streets that I frequent. The trees in my front yard produce curly little brown leaves, an effect that isn’t nearly as aesthetic as the golds or reds, but still the fall palette wouldn’t be quite the same without them.

Back in the Realm of Man, a Swiss Colony catalog arrived the other day in my mailbox, the first explicitly Christmas junk mail of the ’06 holiday marketing push. “Here’s the Catalog you’ve been waiting for,” it says on the cover. Well, no. It also has a sticker on the cover that says, “LOW Monthly Payments!”

Meaning that the prices for their luxury petits fours, upscale beef logs, classy hams and Rockefeller-class fruitcakes are high indeed, so high that you might need to pay over time. Reminds me of the time in the late ’80s when movie theaters started taking credit cards. “All that means,” said a colleague of mine at the time, “is that ticket prices are too high.”