“Chilly” is translated here as being a daily high of 42 F. by day, with a nightly low of around 34 degrees F., no sun and accompanied by frosty blankets of thick, cold fog both day & night. While that may not sound like much to an Alaskan Eskimo or a North Dakota Norwegian, here in a state where the ‘sun always shines’, several uninterrupted weeks of this sort of thing (especially at Christmastime) can make a chap mightily cranky!

The aggregate result is a dreadful collective that tends to make gestation if any ‘merriness’ associated with the seasonal holiday of (specify religion of choice and insert its celebration here, such as Christmas, Chanukah, St. Luchia’s Day, Jul, Zoroaster’s Circumcision Day, Kwanza, or whateverz0, rather trying.

Given that there’s an elementary school close by our home, with a large population of carpetbagger-kids who arrive for school in motorized divisions each day at 8AM, the grrrryl and I usually don our walkies gear and head out into the blackness of pre-dawn gloom at 7AM. This allows enough time to do the 2-mile circuit we frequent at Husky-speeds and arrive back at the starting gate early enough to avoid all the hoards of rug-rats and ankle-biters being disgorged from XTRA large SUVs at the last minute; harried mothers hurriedly toss their kids out, glance at their smartphones and blast back down the 25 MPH-when-children-are-present street at the usual 60+ clip, and disappear over the horizon in a cloud of diesel dust (and ozone...some are EVs).

I’ve got my plugs set firmly in my outer auriculae (those funny anatomical appendages Barack Obama and King Charles have that stick out), senses alert to the possibility of being side-swiped by a car whose driver has had a cup too many of 100-octane-coffee (and may also be a lazy lane-keeper). Mindful of the grrryl’s frequent stops to smell the various doggie signposts along the way for olfactory messages left by other four-footed visitors (traces of squirt and sometimes more ‘solid’ detritus), we continue on our path at warp speed in the semi darkness.

However, between near misses by speeding cars and semi-trucks that blast by in the nearest lane to my 3-foot-wide adjacent pedestrian sidewalk, I usually manage to catch fleeting glimpses of some of the seasonal home decorations, put up by neighbors, that give me pause.

There seems to be an appalling tendency for people to go WAY over the top, in terms of putting up Christmas decorations, I think. Some of the more affluent productions are so incredibly overdone that the Disney Company would likely have a hard time suppressing an urge to sue over intellectual property theft, were they to pass by. One local home that comes to mind has a startlingly good replica of the Fantasyland Castle at Dizzyland in its front yard, surely costing several thousands of American Rassbuckniks. Another ‘tastefully’ (or not!) decorated home features a dozen or so inflatable Mickey & Minnie Mouses, assorted Santas and helpers, several sleighs and God know what else, crowding out the flower beds. One Mickey Mouse is enough...but whole legions of them!? I think not.

Almost all of these homes display the now de rigueur strings of lights fastened to the roof gutters, at the very least, which common practice now encourages them to leave the lights in place, where they incongruously remain all year, strung round like fossils from an ancient age.

Outdoor Bob, a neighbor who lives across the street from us, is a particularly flagrant offender of good taste in this context. Bob is the same ‘Outdoor Bob’ whom I have previously written about, who has an unnatural relationship with his 200 BHP gasoline engine leaf-blower and typically chooses days when the wind reaches gale-force winds to go out and fastidiously rearrange the leaves of his lawn that don’t actually exist (if you’re a normally-sighted mortal like me, but I humor Bob in this). Not only that but Bob seems to fancy himself as a neighborhood Good Samaritan of sorts, I guess, for he then thoughtfully performs the same leaf-blowing cacaphony on the lawns of all of his adjacent neighbors within a half-block (without being asked, of course).

The noise of his 'leaf-blower on steroids' is bad enough, but he does this at least once a day, winter and summer (when the pollen and allergens constitute a nerve-gas-lethal threat to those afflicted with allergies). For my part, I’ve managed to manfully overcome the homicidal urge to go out and strangle Bob at such moments (but probably only because his wife makes such great baked goodies at Christmastime) when I’m trying to write. [Honest, Your Honor, my intentions were honorable, I just got caught up in the passion of the moment!]

But getting back to Bob, his Christmas decorations display is so exponentially tacky that I’m surprised the Good Taste Gestapo haven’t paid him a visit in the wee hours of the night already and turned him over to the Grinch Constabulary (where I hear they subject offenders to several hours of involuntarily watching old Shirley Temple Christmas movies over and over and over...).

Up and down my street, various other quotidian offenders of common scenic decency also do their best to enrage and insult the few of us who still possess excellent aesthetics with their dreadful lapses of taste, but I think it’s the sight of all the flaccid inflatable Christmas characters, lying around like so many dead soldiers on many lawns that particularly irritates me the most.

And then there's the local wag who rearranged his half-inflated blow-up Micky and Minnie so it appears as if Micky is having his way with a bent-over Minnie on the front lawn. Oh yeah, you betcha! 

Now, I began this tirade with the intention of tossing out some innocuous, harmless and reasonably bland pleasantries about all the holiday decorating going on, but I seem to have gotten a bit off-track, haven’t I? Like I said before, “Glad Tidings of Great Joy” are a bit tough to find and isolate in our modern American urban areas, these days...

Personally, I really have no objection to outdoor Christmas decorations displays as long as they are modest, in good taste and not terribly tacky (read: tacky, as in commercial, off-the-shelf and made-in-China by captive Uyghur laborers, etc.). Fortunately, there are still a few houses along the daily route my grrrryl and I tread that are absolutely heart-warming to look at. Unpretentious, not excessively costly or contextually incongruent, and simple. One of these features a small tableaux with Toy Story cartoon characters Woody, ‘Buzz’ Lightyear and the Potato Heads, which all initially seemed rather innoffensive until I remembered that the Dizzy Company had made ‘Buzz’ Lightyear gay...and thus loaded it up with a politically biased ‘woke message.’ [I wonder if the owner of that home has any inkling of this, but thinking it over, he’s probably VERY much aware of the ‘diversity’ statement his ‘Buzz’ is making, since we have a large number of gay couples living nearby. Besides, he has a Subaru OUTBACK parked in his driveway!]

And so, as my pup and I continued down the dark, fog-shrouded path, my thoughts briefly deflected back to my own home, again.

Once back at the manse, a simple flick of the Chube's power-mains switch quickly reminded me of the probably more tacky and even more nausiating nature of all the commercial advertising on the chube that crowds out worthwhile program content for prime air time at Christmas. Even a few minutes of this audiovisual drivel is usually enough to send me screaming for the nearby hills, pulling my hair out. It’s really too much.

Recollections and memories of simple prior snowy Christmases spent in Austria, Bavaria and Southern Idaho, at rustic cabins in the mountains depress me even further!

Each year, as I again reflect on all this crass materialistic consumerism, little cause for satisfaction arises. At the only time during the year when we imperfect Humming Beans may earnestly pray for a few moments of unadulterated hope and joy from whatever Heavens may or may not exist, I get the same old urge: an irrepressible compulsion to go out to my workshop, cut out some large plywood letters, ring them with multi-colored twinkling lights and place them up on the roof, near the Chimney. In my mind’s eye, I can visualize them spelling out *B*A*H*H*U*M*B*U*G* in bright, twinkling lights!

Regrettably each year, when for sharts & giggles I bring up this idea to ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ (otherwise known as ‘Madam Chairman’) as we’re decorating the small Charlie-Brown sized, plastic Made-in-Occupied-Mongolia Christmas tree, I am succinctly told in no uncertain terms that if I even set a single foot on the roof to enact this devilish scheme, there would soon be another pad in our largish doghouse out back, right next to the grrrrryl’s.

And since Madam Chairman wields a mean Chinese meat cleaver when she chops up Beijing Duck for a celebratory dinner, that recollection plus the steely glint in her almond-shaped eyes very clearly conveys meaning and form to the idea of my likely instant demise, should I dare circumvent her wishes...