Glade Scented Oil Candles

It is the 14th of November. The days are getting longer. The air is getting colder. The Halloween candy is only half gone. Chestnuts are roasting on the open fire. Jack Frost nipping at your nose. Yuletide carols being sung by a choir.... Now I know why we are supposed to say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. If you start them in October, somewhere in your seasonal greeting you have to account for Halloween and Thanksgiving.

We drove to Sharon for dinner last night. Peeping Tom that I am, I noticed that several houses had their Christmas trees up and lit already. After dinner, we made a trek to Kraynaks, home of the famous, or infamous, Christmas Tree Lane. We have twinkle lights year round on some sort of artificial plant growth thing on our porch, and the lights had burned out. We went to buy a line of lights and ran into elbow to elbow November Christmas revelers buying out ship loads of that cheap, imported Christmas...well...stuff. I wonder if the owners actually select that...stuff....or if they call up the China sales guy and tell him to send over a couple of boatloads. The City of Sharon should build a port on the Shenango River to unload all of that....stuff.

My 90 year old aunt had her "helpers" over to her condo today to decorate it for Christmas: artificial garland on the banister, artificial tree in the corner, artificial poinsettias around the artificial fireplace. I am going to buy her some Glade Scented Oil Candles so she can have the artificial Christmas smells. Of course, match that up with her artificial hip, artificial knee, and artificial heart, at least there is some symmetry.

I am as guilty as the next guy. By the time my wife and I get done decorating, it looks my house puked Christmas. It is everywhere. We put our outside lights up yesterday because it was sunny and warm. We will decorate the living room and dining room this week and then not go in them until after Thanksgiving. The tree goes up on the back porch the Friday after Thanksgiving along with the family room decorations. On December 1, we put the...stuff....outside the house that can actually can be seen from the road, and have an official lighting around December 5, sooner if we have a Christmas party the first weekend in December. When I was a kid, the tree went up December 20 and came down January 1, and my parents fought over the other decorations for most of the time in between. One year my father was actually putting up the door decorations the day after Christmas because my mother didn't like the glitter cloth the plastic Madonna was plastered on.

John Gibson wrote a new book called The War on Christmas, opining that the liberal establishment is attempting to wipe out the Christian holiday. That probably is true, but it appears to me that most of us are doing a pretty good job of that ourselves. It now takes up in excess of 1/4 of the calendar year, and is approaching a 1/3. Retailers, who are quick to tell their clerks to say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas", are more than anxious to sell merchandise to the "Merry Christmas" set who actually buy all that "Holiday"....stuff. 85% of the nation is Christian, and over 2/3 of them believe the Nativity gospels are literally true. But we are at the stores, credit cards in hands, notwithstanding any indignities the "inclusive" retailers bestow upon us.

There isn't any answer to this issue. That is just the way it is. But my wife asked me as we strolled down the miles of aisles of Christmas...stuff....."Do you ever wonder what all those Chinese people who are making this sh___ think about us?" I know exactly what they think: Ka-ching, and don't mean Kung Pao. Happy Holidays.