Fa la la la

Yesterday the Viking and I needed to run some errands. Errand-running overlapped lunchtime, and lunchtime placed us near a local nursery that puts on a big show for Christmas. Train gardens and Christmas villages and theme trees and all that stuff. It's fun to go look, and we wanted to get a little cedar roping for the house. The train garden is a little bigger this year, and some of the trees were fabulous -- the Viking especially loves the woodland and hunting lodge ones, and this year there was a magnificent woodland Santa/Herne the Hunter figure by one of them, which made my Viking's pagan heart race.

I want a sassanqua camellia. Badly. But since I also want to get Christmas presents for my family, I will probably not be getting myself a shrub.

It was a nice trip, overall. The decorations always look better there than at my house, because the nursery can afford to have lots of them. The effect of hundreds of massed poinsettias is just so much better than a couple of scraggly plants in my living room. (Of course, since my cat Faust believes that if it's green, it must be salad, having poinsettias is not a good idea at my house anyway). It was the other people who made us both want to scream.

Picture this: Crew cut and sweater wearing Yuppie man backs his SUV up to the Christmas tree loading zone. Nursery staff load tree into tailgate of SUV with a forklift. Beaming Yuppie wife takes photos of the whole process with a digital camera.

Right. So, no one there can lift with their knees? I mean, granted, the tailgate was something like 12' tall, but really. Heaven forbid you should get fir needles in that sweater, either. And what are Mr and Mrs Beaming Yuppie going to do once they get the tree home? How are they going to get it out of their SUV? Push it out with a broom? Tie the tip to some solid object and drive slowly away, causing the tree to fall out? Are they just going to put up a ladder and decorate the damned thing there in the vehicle?

Now playing on my internal jukebox: Blink 182, Won't Be Home for Christmas

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