Festivity Abounds (Dec. 31, 2011)

It’s Dec. 31, and this blog piece is not only my last to be posted this year, it’s also the first I’ve posted all this month. Or in forty-one days, if you want to be exact. Oops. It’s been a really busy month.

December—busy? Un heard of, I know. There was the usual flurry of activity as Christmas approached, all the gift-getting and making, card designing and sending, holiday school activities, teacher gifts to give, a few family birthdays, two small painting jobs for me, and for good measure I threw in a major allergy attack and a sprained ankle. Since I wasn’t busy enough.

I fully intended to post a few of my favorite photos of decorations from the last month. The logical timing of this post would have been last week, as the Christmas count-down reached the pinnacle of merriment and anticipation. The sprained ankle five days before Christmas delayed a few things, blogging among them. Yes, you can blog while icing an ankle, but mostly I was busy hobbling around, revising my to do list, and hoping Santa’s elves would clean the house while the big guy unloaded toys. Santa disappeared up the chimney but the mess remained. Did the elves not receive my mess-related email flagged “URGENT”?

Needless to say, blogging about holiday decorations was put on the back burner until after Christmas. So here I am, in the last six hours of this year, finally posting three holiday decoration photos I want to share.

This photo above warrants mention because the tree is at least fifteen feet tall. Someone created the triangle-shaped frame and positioned hundreds of lights on it, topping it with a rotating star. In sheer size and effort, it deserves props. You can see it from afar, lighting the neighborhood like a welcoming beacon of the season.

This tree is near where we live and I’ve walked by it hundreds of times. The owners have a fun sense of humor, and I love that they’ve included lit-up flamingos in the scene. They hang large ornaments form this tree, and wrap its many branches in lights, even adding a disco ball after I took this photo. The idea of transforming the tree in your yard into a Christmas tree to share with the whole neighborhood brings home this season’s theme: giving to others. Even without the symbolic layer, it just looks cool!

My last selection is a late entry, one I discovered two days ago while driving home from a painting job. I was tired but once I saw this house, I had to stop to take a photo. It glowed from a block away. Almost every contour was edged in lights and the brightness struck me as a finale to the season as a whole. If you’ve ever sung Christmas carols in church, you may have noticed that the last verse is sung with extra gusto, with all the stops pulled out of the organ for extra sound. That’s what this house was. An exclamation point, a clear demonstration of someone’s enthusiasm and I dig their spirit.

In a few hours we will transition from 2011 to 2012. The Christmas season is on its way out, and as I observed today in a Target store, bikini season is almost here. (Yes, they literally had swimwear on display on the last day of December.) A new year is upon us, and we hope that with it comes new opportunity, a new chance, a fresh start. I’m still tired from the sprint that December was, but I’m excited to see what 2012 has in store for us. And world, get ready, because I have a few creative ideas of my own to unleash upon the universe!