I have a rainforest worth of catalogs sitting on my kitchen island at this very moment. There are another dozen by the sink that I keep meaning to recycle but, y’know, life. And damn it all if I didn’t just look to my left and see another stack on this table beside my chair. I’m lucky these things haven’t overpowered me in my sleep yet.

But Linda said to use the latest, and for lack of a better system I’m gonna use the first one I laid eyes on which is – surprise, surprise – All About Christmas. Yee haw.

A few years back we knew it was time to replace the tree. Our old one had bit the dust hard and I couldn’t bear the thought of one more year picking branch pieces out of the carpet after wrestling with the thing to make it look, oh, I dunno, lifelike? It was time to get a decent tree, which is how we ended up looking at Balsam Hill, and that’s how we ended up with a really awesome artificial tree that makes me smile every single year.

So when we packed up our stuff to move to the new house I took a long, hard look at our outdoor wreaths. They were about ten years old – that’s ten years of hanging in the cold, the rain, the sleet, the occasional North Carolina snow – and they looked it. Poor things, they had given their all and had no more to give. It was time to update. And where else would I look beside Balsam Hill when I love my tree so much.

So now we’ve got a little stack of brand new wreaths in the corner of the dining room, just waiting to show their brand spanking new branches to the world. Here’s hoping we can get more than a decade out of these beauties.

Linda hosts Stream of Consciousness Saturday. This week’s prompt is “flyer/ad.” Look at the latest ad you got in the mail (if it’s a store flyer, choose the product right in the middle of the page) or choose the next online ad you find, and theme your post on whatever the product is. Do not name the brand if you hate it, unless you add that it’s an opinion/review of the product in question. You don’t want to chance getting sued. Have fun!