From the start, let me just say that I know there will be Scrooges that are irritated that I am writing about Christmas in early October, and to those folks I say life’s too short to be so miserable.

Anyway, it’s now October which means we have officially entered my absolute favorite time of year. Football is on nearly every day, the humidity is less like the broiling oven that it has been, and before long the grass will no longer need cutting. Glory, glory.

To christen this season, Saturday the kids received a Christmas catalog from Amazon in the mail. You would have thought Santa himself had walked in the room the way they dropped what they were doing and ran to me when I announced the catalogs arrival.

Within minutes lists were made, pages were dog eared and shouts of, “Wait! I want this too!” were heard from distances not yet measured by man. Climbers at the peak of Everest now know which Legos my children want for Christmas.

There’s just something about a Christmas catalog. We have a world of options at our fingertips on the internet, but there’s nothing like laying on the floor flipping the pages and seeing what’s next.

The number of trees that were slaughtered so that my siblings, cousins and I could tell our grandparents what we wanted for Christmas is too great a number to write out. Every year we would pass the catalogs around and circle whatever our hearts desired, numbering them by priority and then initialing them.

These catalogs were an invitation to discovery; we found things in those pages we never knew we wanted, but now understood we could not possibly live without. I once got a sled that looked like a spaceship. I lived my entire life in Middle Tennessee, where we saw just a little more snow than the folks in the Amazon rainforest but that sled was in the catalog and it looked awesome.

I promise I’ll try and keep my Christmas musings limited until December, but some memories just can’t wait to be shared.