A Post Holiday Stroll

It has been unseasonably warm in these parts, ideal weather for walking off some Holiday calories.  A few recent sightings:

Here we have the two great secular interlopers to Christmas slumped in post holiday torpor.

Difficult to even say what this started out to be.  Having seen quite a few of these sad deflated entities around town I can only conclude that they run off of little blower fans that are hooked into the same circuit as the strings of Christmas lights.  Odd that the Midwestern aesthetics that objects to lights on in the daylight hours has no problem overlooking something that resembles the Wicked Witch of the West, post dousing with water.

Investigators from the NTSB have reached the crash site and have recovered the black box, incongruously wrapped in gaudy paper and with a ribbon and bow around it.

These are not quite the "Zombie Pumpkins" I ran across the other day, but are still an interesting bit of cultural evidence.  Something like 75% of Americans enter and exit their houses from the garage, so rotting vegetables on the front steps really don't get noticed much.  I am a bit surprised that local critters have not nibbled on these, we have no shortage of squirrels, raccoons and so forth.  I even had a bear wander down our street a few years back.

He's holding a candy cane so I suppose this relates to Christmas somehow.  Almost by default, as there are to my knowledge no holidays in which monkeys play any significant role.