Why I Oughta...

With the holidays (officially) winding down in our house and the decorations being tucked back into their tubs and boxes, I wanted to include in my Web diary a photo of our front yard Christmas tree and our blow mold Santa and three reindeer .  I've done this in the past including a similar photo last year featuring the tree and Santa/reindeers .  The front yard tree *is* a thing in Downers Grove, but that's not why we do it.  We do it because of our time on Indiana Street in Elmhurst .  We really loved that tradition, so we've kept it despite moving to Downers.  This is the 11th year of documenting our front yard Christmas tree tradition - and 12th year of a front-yard photo.  2019 post was only of the blowmolds , so I'm not counting that in the 11 years.  Here's our 2021 front yard tree featuring a fresh snow covering our tree and Santa/reindeer. Here's our 2020 front yard Christmas tree with Santa and his reindeer .  Here's a photo of our Santa...

For the first time , our blowmold 1 Santa Claus - sitting in his sleigh - has his three blowmold reindeer up and flying up, up and away.   He's in our front yard and all lit up with a brand new set of reins that are made of 30' of rope light from Menards.   I have been trying to think about how to get the reindeer to 'fly' for a number of years.  We didn't even put this set out last Christmas because I was caught in 'planning mode' too long and never got around to getting them to fly.  My initial design called for them to be 'wired up' between the ground and the large Maple tree in our front yard.  I went so far as to install two large metal eyelets directly in the trunk of the tree about 12 feet up in the air.  I was contemplating running some wire (kind of like the wire I used on the espalier system in the back ) from the eyelets down to some sort of grounding mechanism.  My initial thought was to buy one of those spiral metal thin...

At the beginning of the month, I posted a couple of photos of the beginning of Menards Christmas setup at their Bolingbrook store.  The 'Enchanted Forest" is something that I look forward to every year as they always have some new items to check out.  Anybody who has been in a big box store during the holidays the past few years will attest that there is a HUGE market for inflatable outdoor decorations.  I've succumbed to the inflatable trend and we have a couple of BIG ones we put out at Halloween .   But, Menards is also holding strong with the blowmold market.  They put out holiday blowmolds for Halloween - and I've covered them here on the blog before - and looking at the analytics of this site, that's a popular post, so plenty of people are looking for Halloween Blowmolds from Menards.   There's more Halloween blowmolds in this post from 2011 , too.    They also do quite a bit of Christmas blowmolds as part of the...

Continuing the annual tradition of trying to document on the blog the various times we first come across the Menards Enchanted Forest Christmas setup.  Posting this on the 24th of September, but I took this photo a week ago.  I've talked over the years about the notion of "Christmas Creep" and how I'm just fine with it.  Mid/late September is right in the middle of Fall holiday planning for most, but I understand why retailers are moving Christmas earlier and earlier.  I've done the Christmas Creep documenting on the blog over the years.  Here's 2017's version  that I posted on September 28th. Here's 2016's version that I posted on September 26th. Here's 2015's version that I posted on October 6th. Here's 2011's version that I posted on September 17th. So this is the second earliest, but based on when I took this photo, it might have been a tie?  As for the actual display, they have both their Halloween stuff up in ...