I was going to blog on Wednesday, but Jennifer’s normal hockey game was canceled, so I spent the evening with her instead of you. Sorry. I’ll make it up to you.

I finally put up some Christmas lights last week, probably more lights on the outside of the house than I ever have before, but still not nearly as much as the guy across the street who always has something musical or animated or, more often, musical and animated. I certainly don’t mind that he has more lights than I do, but I’m just trying to give you an idea of how many lights are involved–because I am not the guy on the block who goes overboard.

It’s hard to use phrases like “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” in southern California because it’s really not. The weather today is sunny and it will probably reach 70 degrees outside. And I just heard our heater fire up, because if it’s below 72 degrees (or above 77) in the house, then the world may in fact come to an end. I don’t know this to be true because it’s never happened, but I’m just saying.

I put up our fake, pre-strung Christmas tree up a couple weeks ago, and even managed to figure out why the lights on the bottom haven’t been lighting for the last couple years. It’s one of those trees with a spinning base, which is supposed to be so that you can see the tree on all sides, but I mostly find that it is helpful for putting on the ornaments because you and the kids can just stand in one place and wait for empty spots to appear. Taking the ornaments down is just as easy. Genius.

The only downside of the spinning tree is that you have be careful about putting presents underneath it because the branches will scrape along the boxes noisily and occasionally catch a ribbon or bow and take a present for a ride. The brown shipping boxes have begun to appear on the doorstep, so sooner or later we’ll have turn off the spinny part of the tree so that we can fit the boxes underneath. Yes, the brown boxes with the UPS labels and everything. This is what happens when you move 2000 miles away from your nearest relatives. Please read back to the paragraph about the weather to understand why.

This weekend we’ll go out to some Christmas-themed community attractions, and to a party over at the neighbor’s musical, animated house, where their kids and our kids will run around the backyard, the adults will clink glasses of eggnog against bottles of beer, and we’ll chat about the weather.