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It was a hothouse in the middle of winter, even as people waited outside to get back in — and reheat – the dance floor. So it’s fire red, and even white and blue, that along with green (house) fuel the season.

We focus on all things colorful this holiday, and not just people’s language, as Black Friday yields to other shopping days, and every one leads you closer to its last. (Sorry to the original rock band, and they are not carolers).
But again music shines the way. Even if it is interrupted for 10 minutes. Again, a few choice words.
The Smilin’ Moose had a frown because its DJ dancing was disrupted when, as I read it, its hot dancers led to a hot spot in the ceiling that caught fire! People were being turned away temporarily at the door, but I was left through (either because I was just one person in my party, or since a doorman has been calling me Pimp Juice, which he explained is the focus of a song by Nelly and is a good thing). That half of the venue that features people strutting their stuff — a bachelor-party’s worth had just vacated the building — was empty but for a couple of men using a ladder to put a great big panel back in place, and security guards busily scrambling this way and that. So kudos for them getting the situation handled, and for the patrons to avoid the dance floor and stick to the bar-rail side. Its a toiugh life. Good thing the lower patio has been closed down for the winter.
Two places in my extended neighborhood have swirling bunnies or other quasi-Christmas creatures, on their garage doors, led by one small floodlight that in one fell swoop has everything from light pink to Deep Purple. A third has been added this season, and the existing ones may have been blighted by snow. This is an annual affair, and the number of those in the display seems quite a bit more than usual. Up the way again, there are strings of lighted decorative figures as many as the number of reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh. They are strobe-light style. So on dancer and prancer and flasher? (In a good way). Down the way, a single bulb emits the same rotating color scheme, onto a decked out mailbox, and in the middle of all this is a light being shined on a pole-sitting birdhouse of all things, that has replaced a mailbox, and the Postal Service has a warrant out (just kidding).
A far-flung neighbor has photographed in her yard a pink squirrel — and not the cocktail although we suspect she might have had one — but food coloring not included, and so the white ones not so funky. And we take it a third way, and suggest a Grey Goose as a great holiday gift that smacks of a buddy’s favorite (clear) vodka, or gray duck or should I say a white duck. For a stocking stuffer, combine the four colors, two times around, and you might win the lottery (it’s the season and they’ll share), with as a bonus holiday scenery (in Minnesota), and a finally arriving ode to ugly sweater contests (on both sides of the river at Kwik Trip), and you’ll find these scratch games just the ticket.
Peek-a-boo! One the corner leading to the North Hudson industrial park, watching all the people go by, is a big red Santa who is spying with one red eye because the other side of his face and body were blocked from view by the corner of a reddish house.
The glove(s) found, two times, lying in the snowy street — Michael Jackson style and notably OJ small — and Christmas tree lights and even the spiral notebooks one online mom wanted to have so desperately for her kids for school, and not just Christmas pageants, had one thing in common — they came in the colors or red, white and blue, all three having one of those three colors missing. (And not always the same one, and its gets more muddled when we throw lime green into the mix.)
It was traveling trillions of miles, or a like number of light years, and thus many millions of passengers, who were screened to allow them to get on a near record number of holiday flights. And billions of unsalted peanuts, served over a career of that (one?) flight attendant? And two more to unshell them?
In a TV commercial, the man loading the groceries into the trunk of a car wore a face mask, but not the driver. And the product for the ad? We’re guessing they sell half-and-half masks.
Just in time for the 16 inches of snow we just got, there was a news alert that went out that for some people, in some areas, with certain kinds of service, and certain styles of oven, with a certain kinds of kitchen flooring, and cleaned and sanitized and disinfected with a certain kind of mop … they may be without holiday power. Could that result in undercooked turkey or ham, and bigger problems?
It did lead to carefully defined paths that revealed sidewalk, much like you typically see in the Upper Peninsula come January. They also could abruptly segue into sheer piles of snow that received no such treatment at all. And that pirate ship in the yard from back on Halloween had no oars in its water at all, as no snow had melted. A house down the way, come just short of 1 a.m., had pulled the plug on its holiday lighted decor, but others left the Christmas lights on their front porch all night long.
This is a fitting name for a holiday concert, even though its rock, since it you rearrange the letters you almost get “Xmas.” Yam Haus plays The Palace in St. Paul on Dec. 17. In the evening.
Another aisle of candy had been added for a previous holiday at Wal-Mart. They have rearranged the positioning of much of their inventory, but that does not necessarily mean its more consumer friendly, in a switcharoo that started during the heyday of the virus, to go more online with sales, which in the short term resulted in gaps where almost half an aisle of shelving was empty. This was even more true when the back-to-school and then-to-be-promised Black Friday and Xmas shopping rushes hit.
You thought those dryer sheets had outlasted their use, even if thrown in a second or third time with other older ones? Gift them to someone and let them deal with it. (And this is what caused a stir back a few years in Roberts, where the owner of a septic system cleaning company got called on the carpet for taking the stuff that is his stock and trade and spreading it on farm fields as fertilizer, and guess what else showed up by the hundreds! I wrote the story and it was by no means a “puff piece.” Sorry). So what to do? Cut up the frosty looking things and make them into snowflake-shaped decorations, rather than flushing them down the toidy. Later regift your creations, not recycle?
In this, the case of PJ and ugly sweater parties, onesies are not just the single lane during construction through downtown Hudson — which sometimes were changing gear, direction and access overnight (like seen on NYE, until the dawn lights the day) — but two-pieced as now, again, is the number of traffic lanes back through the boutique/antiques/bar district.
Saw an ad using a styrofoam (can I say that?) figurine to display women’s tops — a gift? — that now shows prevalently, twice, why its being posted in winter (again can I say that?) Get my drift?

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