You Jason? You Jason? You want some Christmas cheer, very cheap?

The Parental Unit is in town, and today it was off to the city centre with them to avoid the Myer Christmas Window Event in Bourke Street. It seemed a pretty easy task at first; all along Flinders Street and up Swanston Street we managed to avoid it, and for about an hour after that, while we performed various tasks in the vicinity of Russell Street (dodging the chap who unsuccessfully tried to sell us 'very cheap' Christmas cheer on the corner of Russell and Bourke). We successfully avoided viewing the Christmas Window Event during lunch at the Shanghai Dumpling House, and continued this avoidance for another three hours at Melbourne Central shopping centre. It all came to a horrendous end, however, with everyone converging on Bourke Street, mid-afternoon, right in front of a certain window wherein could be found hideous plastic figurines, leering manically at the children outside, both figurines and children gurning at one another in a manner quite terrifying to behold, while a hollow voice boomed repeatedly from somewhere, 'You'd better watch out... you'd better not cry... HE KNOWS WHEN YOU'VE BEEN SLEEPING... HE KNOWS WHEN YOU'RE AWAKE... HE KNOWS IF YOU'VE BEEN BAD OR GOODSOBEGOODFORGOODNESSSAKE!'

We fled as soon as we could.

Such were the Christmas decorations in the city: in Lalor the Christmas decorations were of an entirely different order, consisting of:
- One (1) Garage lined with flashing lights in our street;
- Three (3) giant inflatable Santas in a backyard, tastefully several blocks away from ours;
And that's about it really. It is an entirely different place out here.