'Tis the Season, Part I

So...

The Christmas decorations are up. The house is full of 80 years worth of accumulated holiday stuff and Mom says "I've never seen that train set before in my life" about a table decoration that's been in the family for decades. I couldn't keep track of it all, either.

My brother has decorated the tree with a combination of his collection of hand-blown German glass ornaments worth hundreds of dollars each, and LED changing-color bulbs and kitsch (including an animated Santa on the top of the tree waving a lantern around like a drunken sailor and a miniature "dancing" Santa that jerks about in the branches looking more like Frodo in Shelob's web than anything else). The tree rotates and every two minutes Santa-in-the-web swings around and creeps me out.

The neighbor across the street has set out a slew of inflatable holiday characters--Santa, reindeer, snowmen, elves, trees, etc. They're all lit from within and blow up with hot air. They don't wiggle or wave or any of the antics the inflatable tube men do at the used car dealers but it is quite a mob. He turns off the power when he goes to bed so, in the morning, his lawn looks like the site of some horrendous Yule-tide massacre with a couple dozen limp corpses littering two sides of his house. There's another house around the corner and down the street with a similar but smaller display. They, too, lie flat and crumpled in the misty light of dawn, except for a solid Gingerbread Man with his arms raised, the sole survivor of his patrol trying to surrender, and a small white creature that is probably a sheep or maybe a miniture polar bear but could just as easily be Spuds McKenzie.

Turns out, this little town is the burrowing owl capital of the world. A couple Saturdays ago was Burrowing Owl Appreciation Day or something.

Did I mention all the fire hydrants in town are lavender?