I have no idea why but to me garden centres and Christmas are intrinsically linked. I do not start feeling truly Christmassy until I have made the annual pilgrimage to at least one and spent a good few hours perusing their Christmas wares.
What gets me is; why do garden centres always have so many Christmas decs and have such great displays? It is not your garden that you usually decorate (unless you are the type that likes flashy but flat Santas stuck to your outside walls) or at least it is not the most important part of the decorations. Is it?
And yet garden centres are like the Mecca for all keen Crimbo decorators like myself. I get up early and have bacon butties as sustenance for the long trip ahead. I arrive five minutes before opening time expecting to get in, which I usually do, but also expecting it to be empty, each year forgetting the hoards of people just like me doing exactly the same.
Inevitably it will be a trip involving gawping at exotic fish, using toilets that smell of your granny's lavender perfume and perhaps a watery cuppa if you can spare the time and bear the queue. Inevitably I will buy nothing or, on occasion, the odd piece that happens to fit with this years theme which was of course planned during a similar trip last year.
For the sad truth is this annual trip is actually a planning session not for this year, oh no, for the following year. I now know exactly how I want Christmas 2012 to look and what I will need to make it happen.
And as soon as the sales start I will go and buy what I need to make it happen before packing it safely away in the cellar till next year!
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