consider this a warning

If you're feeling a little Christmas phobic,
if the tree counter in the sidebar gives you the screaming heebies
best look away now.
In fact you might want to avoid this blog completely till the New Year

Once upon a time I used to start putting up the Christmas stuff on the first of December. That was in the days when I could do it all in a day or so. Gradually, I made and acquired more stuff, it took longer to get done, and so the starting date crept forward to the weekend before the start of December.
Which would be this weekend coming
... except that Chris and Maz arrive tomorrow and I prefer not to have anyone here for the first day or so because it's complete and utter chaos as I dust, wash and put away the blue things and drag the boxes down from the shed, allocate them to their respective rooms and go at it. Yes, I know that Maz would understand why the house is a mess.
Yes I know that she'd want to help and believe me, this isn't close to finished yet, so I'm sure there'll be plenty still to do
Maz is known to do a fair amount of the Christmassing herself... but ... I want to enjoy my guests and not be buzzing around like a blue arsed fly, making them feel in the way.
So I started yesterday...
slight pause to allow for the squee of seasonal joy from Sheepy...


and here's a not at all gratuitous shot of Oakley 'helping' by jumping up onto the buffet and demanding that I tell him what a gorgeous boy he is.
another brief pause... this time for you to admire last week's RFO directly behind His Royal Fluffiness.

... and anyway, after I'd finished my devotions before the altar of male cat perfection, I tried to remove him so that he wouldn't upset the skinny Santas who are always a little precariously balanced at best... and
I knocked the whole row over ...
Twice.

ETA this is driving me flamin' bonkers
the all too familiar scenario transpires thus:
a commenter says " no photos" so I check - photos seem fine - I even comment back to that effect. Then I check back an hour or two later and ... the Catsmum she no see the photos ... grrrrrrrrr. So then I go through all the rigamarole of putting them back but now there's those little white outlined boxes where the photos used to be and for all I know, in some RSS feed version floating around, there are two sets of the same photos! Can someone tell me why Blogger hates me specifically??