Undeck the Halls

Well, downstairs is "undecked," as are the windows. It takes a shorter time to take things down, even if you are placing things in certain boxes, because when you put up the decorations, you need to arrange and fluff and unwrap. But it still takes a while...whew! I discovered that the airplane tree and ornaments, the Santa and tree in the bathroom, the things in the hall, and the woodland tree (just the tree, with the gingham table cover) would all fit in the library tree box without squishing. The woodland ornaments, Santa, and other decor I put in a big clear shoebox which should fit somewhere in the closet.

Oh, something funny happened early in the afternoon. If you recall, I said that the Dish Holiday Music channel was still on. It played in the background all morning. Then, at 1 p.m., just when I was thinking about lunch anyway, I noticed that the channel had change. I have the DVR set up to change channels when any new episodes of the "Animal Heroes" shows, like Animal Precinct and Animal Cops, come on, but they are usually broadcast at 10 p.m. weeknights—but sure enough, this was a new episode of Animal Cops South Africa.

So I had my lunch and watched it, but after it was finished, just went back to work without changing the channel. In a few minutes I became aware that the next program on Animal Planet featured...ugh...snakes. Well, I'd just put the Holiday Music channel back on!

Except...it was gone! Like that, flat in the middle of the day! How extraordinary! I would have thought they would have waited until the day's end to cut it off.

I am watching a cheap DVD I bought on Amazon, "Christmas at Home." It's a dog's breakfast of different cartoons, pretty badly transferred. Some of them are fairly well-known, like the Fleischer Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, a "Little Audrey" short, and a Sylvester and Tweety cartoon. One is a British cartoon called Santa's Pocket Watch, where Santa has a collection of funny elves named after their physical attributes and one reindeer named Garibaldi (why the reindeer is named after a cookie is beyond me). Apparently this is the original British version (however badly transferred) rather than an American-dubbed version which some viewers found "terrible." Also included on the disk is Santa and the Three Bears, The Little Christmas Burro, and the unrestored version of Rankin-Bass' Jack Frost, which actually isn't a Christmas offering, but is hosted by a groundhog and is a winter story.