Last night Lynn, William and myself headed downtown Hillsboro to watch the Christmas tree lighting. They cut a ~20' Douglas fir and put it up at the relatively new civic center. They were also passing out free cookies, hot chocolate and coffee. It turned out to be a pretty rainy evening, but I was surprised at the number of people that showed up. I guess the seasoned Oregonians aren't put off by a little rain. We put William in his Barcelona poncho and Lynn and I busted out the ole' Purude umbrella. It was nice to not have so many people around so we could let William wander around more. Even Santa showed up with his...ah... snow pixie? I'm not sure what she was, but William eyed both with suspicion.



Now we're in December! I've held off on any Christmas things until December. I will partake in some Post-Thanksgiving sales, but no Lights nor Tree nor Christmas elf. I've been seeing Christmas displays in stores for the past month... I'm usually "Yay for Capitalism!", but not when it comes for Christmas (and turns into Consumerism).

As a side note, has anybody purchased those LED lights? I guess they have several upsides to traditional Christmas lights... if you ignore their 8x cost. The LED's never burn out, so no more fiddling with burnt out strings. They don't use much power, so you could (almost) literally run your entire house out of one socket. They don't get hot, so you reduce the risk of fire. I though "Great, lets buy em". NOPE! Totally sold out this year. The only ones I saw left on the shelves were the imitation old-school bulbs (the big ones). All the others were gone. Crap. Guess I'll wait and see what happens.

On a side note, it might be a good time to find out who makes the majority of them and invest a little $$ into them.