DollsArtCats

I have Halloween decorations I leave up, or rather around, all year. I have a rubber rat by the back door that acts as one of those spring door stops, since there isn't one installed there, and various Halloween magnets and cards live around the house until they just become part of the decor. The toad I have here is new, though, so I haven't quite found a home for it--it spent Halloween on the kitchen table, frowning at a tiny bowl of sunflower native seeds that I finally got into the ground this week, so he's still on the table, where the tiny tabletop tree goes. And he looked kind of ..plain. I thought about making him a Christmas collar, but then I remembered that Cat had made me several small crowns, so I found some festive elastic and now the Halloween Toad is now the Christmas toad. Or perhaps the Sugarplum Toad: Toads are awesome. We have real ones in the back in the summer:

Apparently everyone in the US buys their Christmas decorations in November, because by the time J and I start vaguely thinking of maybe buying a few lights or a tree, they are all gone. I've had a stag light-up deer for a year now, and he's been fun (he was up all last winter, partly because he froze to the ground, but also because he is cute and not exclusively a Christmas ornament.) But I have always thought it would be nice to have at least one more deer, so we wandered down to Home Depot this evening, and there was the other half of the set--but all the deer had been bought except for the floor model, so we bought the floor model doe. She lights up fine, too. If I was really enterprising I would buy a spool of 12 gauge wire and make a couple more does to live further down the hill, but so far that has only been an idea. We still are kind of doing Thanksgiving, too:

Not even November 15 and the poor man is already in Xmas Hell. The decorations do look nice though. This was at the farmer's market in mid-October: I'm still doing Halloween--here's Poe in his natural habitat before we brought him home: And the weather was warm enough in October for bottle-opening flip-flops, belonging to Akutenshi7: I do need to mail whatever I am going to mail for Christmas soon though, because the mail gets impossible in December. I'm just not ready yet. :D

I have wanted one of these for years, but the fact that it is a useless yard deco that costs nearly 30.00 has put me off (more than an entire tree). But I was at Home Depot and there was one box left, so I bought it, and brought it home. Some assembly required: After 10 minutes, nailed it! The problem is that it's shipped with the lights already strung, but the head is stored in the body, and the antlers had gotten sort of wound around the lights. I did finally untangle it and get it together correctly, and there in the bottom of the box were the directions! Not that I would have read them anyway. As a side note, Stripey does not eat that grass from the pet store. She eats the fern instead.