OK, I need to preface this by saying that I adore Christmas. The day after Thanksgiving, I will be breaking out the Christmas music and starting to decorate the house. But today I am feeling pretty malevolent towards the whole Christmas thing…<\/p>\n
See, I need a rake. Specifically, a kid-sized rake that Carrie can use this weekend with Denis so they can get some yard work done while I’m at the shop. I’d like a decent quality rake, but at this point I’d settle for some piece of plastic junk that will be recalled in six months due to excessive lead paint.<\/p>\n
Target was a bust. They haven’t had fall stuff out since before Halloween. In fact, the sales associate actually laughed at me when I asked where they might be hiding. KMart was also a bust, although I couldn’t even find anyone to ask. So I thought, Home Depot! They must still have rakes, because their business is home, lawn and garden stuff, not Christmas!<\/p>\n
I was encouraged by the big “Fall Cleanup” sign hanging near the door, but that turned out to be a grand total of 17 giant black plastic rakes sticking out of a box…right next to a field of plastic Christmas trees. And when I went to the service desk to ask, I was told “oh, kid rakes sold out a long time ago.” Um, it hasn’t really been fall for all that long… “But it’s Christmas now, and people see them and buy them for gifts so they sell out really fast.”<\/p>\n
OK I have two problems with that statement. First of all, who in heck buys a rake as a Christmas gift for a kid? And second of all, last I checked, it’s November 7th. If I’m reading my calendar correctly (and it’s been a long day, maybe I’m not) Christmas is December 25th. If I had walked in on December<\/em> 7th and asked for a rake, then maybe I could see the reasoning behind telling me it’s Christmas now and rakes are “only sold during the fall. Um, you know, while the leaves are falling.” (OK, um, as a matter of fact all the leaves are actually still mostly on my trees. So, I was kind of thinking that fall isn’t exactly over yet…?)<\/p>\n I’m all for holiday spirit and all that, but please, for the love of Christmas, can’t we at least enjoy some turkey first? And perhaps a good bit of raking and leaf-pile jumping?!?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" OK, I need to preface this by saying that I adore Christmas. The day after Thanksgiving, I will be breaking out the Christmas music and starting to decorate the house. But today I am feeling pretty malevolent towards the whole<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holidays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahsthreads.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahsthreads.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahsthreads.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahsthreads.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahsthreads.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahsthreads.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahsthreads.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahsthreads.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahsthreads.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}