By Aubrey Beardsley

We are decorating!

Decorating is extremely important at this time of year.

It is absolutely essential that the staircase gets covered in greenery making it twice as treacherous as usual to go up and down. All the windows get covered in some sort of blinking trip wires. And some elves turn up, mostly to check on Howard. Actually, I suspect there will be a whole village of elves turning up this year. Ha ha!

But the elves haven’t shown up yet, so we are making the most of the opportunity. The humans have been cleaning the kitchen, emptying cupboards, checking supplies, and we are helping in every way we can. Howard thinks it is quite wasteful to have two of everything. In fact, just today he has already managed to edit the kitchen collection to one yard shoe, one gardening glove, one yard glove. He is an ingenious little terrier.

Deputy got into trouble for knocking a precious Santa to the floor without noticing. I tried to hide the evidence by turning the Santa into snow, but apparently this just made everything more obvious. I think that’s what’s known as unintended consequences. Goodness me, there have been a lot of those in 2018!

Anyway, with the amount of fun we are having the progress is very slow. We don’t even have the tree in yet. And we still have to booby-trap the staircase with garland. At this rate we might have just about done the lights by February.

As Kris Kringle said in that wonderful classic, Miracle on 34th Street, Christmas isn’t just a day. Well, it’s just as well, because decorating isn’t either!