Sunday October 19th 2025
We seem to be living in a world of colliding holidays. Halloween decorations and candy started appearing in stores during August. The big home improvement stores had aisles of blowup ghouls, ghosts, vampires, witches as wells all shapes and sizes of pumpkins. In September, as the Halloween decorations got sold the space was filled with Christmas decorations.
Last week, during a visit to Lowes, one side of the main aisle had Halloween and the other side had Christmas decorations. The motion detectors on the Halloween zombie decorations would trigger when you got near setting off motion detectors in Santa Claus across the aisle. There is something very weird about Santa and the devils friend having a conversation in a home improvement store.
This weekend the Halloween blowups were all relegated to a little corner area. The rows were lined with Christmas trees and blowup Christmas figures. Many of the blowups had a distinct Disney flare. I don’t know if the Disney touch is local to this area, but there sure were a lot of Mickey Ears on Santa Claus. It will be interesting to see what kinds of decorations show up at Disney’s Fort Wilderness Campground for each of the holidays. I plan to walk through the campground before Halloween to check out the usually over the top display and again near Christmas.
On a similar theme of pushing the holidays. The Hallmark channel’s Christmas movie marathon has started. It makes great background TV. All the plots are so similar that you don’t need to watch the whole thing to know what’s going on. You can also tell time within a two hour window by how well the leads like each other. In the first part they don’t like each other. During the middle hour they like each other leading up to a major disagreement. The last hour is filled with rebuilding their relationship leading to the happy ending. Everything else that goes on in the movie is used to disguised the basic plot and add the directors improbable hope for an award wining film.
Rob's Rambling Road Trip 
The picture you painted of Santa and the devil’s friend having a “conversation” is classic! That could be in a movie scene! Well done! I watched many a Hallmark movie with my mother who has now passed. You could set the clock based on the couple’s relationship status. The first almost kiss. The misunderstanding. The reconciliation. Still the movies are kind of a feel good moment. No surprises, but pretty people and scenery. I don’t think the directors hope for an award. They are happy as long as they keep or grow their audience. Now, I must add, I love, love, love “When Calls the Heart” on Hallmark. We do watch it later though, so we can skip the crazy amount of commercials. Lastly, I enjoy seeing your photos of the Disney decorations at Fort Wilderness, so I look forward to those. Have a good week!
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