Took us several years as homeowners to realize this undying truth of November: If you want to put up Christmas lights, seize any rainless spell you can. You’ve probably noticed that our current reprieve has led to a sudden pre-Thanksgiving blast of decorations around the neighborhoods. We’ve seen at least half a dozen homes and “multi-family” buildings suddenly sporting lights along the stretch of Fauntleroy between Alaska and California. One more day till the next storm hits, or so they say.

Didn’t get to do this last year ’cause we didn’t launch WSB till Christmas Eve. But this year, we’re rarin’ to go. Our “WS holiday stuff” page is up — just a couple entries so far, but many more to come. When you’ve got a big public holiday event planned, or when you see a spectacular decoration display — something to rival the Menashe house, for example — be sure to let us know, so we can add the info to the holiday page and share it with everyone.

Only two little groups of trick-or-treaters at our house. One commenter a couple posts down says her neighborhood on the north end of WS (we’re on the south end) got more than a hundred. What happened at your place?

Bundle up for a cold Halloween night (latest forecast here). After your trick-or-treating is done, this West Seattle house sounds like THE haunt of the night. Perhaps a close second — this guy’s house.

So many Halloween happenings this past weekend, you might feel as if the actual holiday has come and gone. Don’t pack that costume away just yet! Here’s some of what’s happening around WS tonight and tomorrow … TONIGHT: Fall Festival at Southwest Community Center, 6-8:30 pm … HALLOWEEN: Alki business-district trick-or-treating, 1-6 pm … Admiral business-district trick-or-treating, 3-6 pm … Cooper Artists’ Housing trick-or-treating (back of the old Cooper School aka Youngstown), 5-7 pm … Westwood Village trick-or-treating, 5-7 pm … Fall Fun Festival @ Delridge Community Center, 6-8 pm … E-mail us if we’re missing something! P.S. Check the weather forecast here. Brrrr!

One last reminder … Junction trick-or-treating 1-3 pm today. Given the influx of young parents into WS, I predict a surge of people carrying babies and toddlers in pumpkin suits. Have a blast!

We don’t have “our own” big fireworks display over here, but you can see lots of good stuff without leaving West Seattle.

BIGGEST: Fourth of Jul-Ivar’s, over Elliott Bay. Look toward the Space Needle — if you are so far up the northern side of the WS shoreline that you CAN’T see the Needle, you probably won’t be able to see the fireworks. Stake out a viewing spot early, whether you’re on the shore or up above (the Admiral viewpoint, the north Cali Ave viewpoint, etc.).

SECONDARY: If you’re at the right angle, you will see some of the Lake Union show “behind” the Elliott Bay show. Or, if you watch toward the west, you will probably catch some Bainbridge Island fireworks. And if you are on the west/south shore, looking toward Vashon, you can see some of their shows too — I hear there’s supposed to be a big display over Quartermaster Harbor this year.

As for personal fireworks, they’re illegal in the Seattle city limits, but not in the neighboring chunk of unincorporated King County known as White Center — the closest fireworks stands are in and near the parking lot of the Safeway on Roxbury, just barely over the city-limits line.

Happy Independence Day!

A sighting of popper noisemakers at QFC reminds me … If nothing else, here’s a reason to keep White Center un-annexed, and therefore unincorporated: If either Seattle or Burien takes over the turf, that means no more fireworks. I’m not a fan of those heavy-duty war-grade monstrosities you can get at the reservations, but I do think it’s appropriate to have a few sparklers in your own back yard on Independence Day. So, for as long as we’ve been in West Seattle, we’ve wandered over to the Roxbury Safeway parking lot a day or two ahead of time and bought a few boxes of safe-n-sane fireworks, then clandestinely ignited them in our yardlet, hoping nobody would sic the cops on us. But they’re against the law in Burien as well as Seattle, so if either of those cities annexes our neighboring chunk of unincorporated King County, it’s farewell, fireworks. Food 4 thought. Meantime, in a few weeks you’ll find us over in the Safeway parking lot tent, trying to settle on a modest pack of personal pyrotechnics.

A few years after we moved to West Seattle, my mom decided it sounded like a great place for her to get a midlife re-start. So she moved here too. She found a great apartment near the Morgan Junction, with a peek view of the Sound and the Olympics. Eventually she found a job with a local nonprofit and started to build a life.

Then she started losing weight. We thought she just had an appetite problem. After a few months, we convinced her to see a doctor … who discovered she had one of the nastiest forms of cancer. (Not that any form of cancer is NOT nasty, but some are curable or nearly so — this one wasn’t.) Things fell apart quite rapidly. The nonprofit cut her loose before she even had a chance to start treatment (I won’t name them here but I do hold a bit of a grudge because of the way they treated her). She accepted the incurability faster than we did — and just kind of settled in to die.

This wasn’t really like her. She was always a bon vivant. But she decided she’d lived a good life (even though she was ridiculously young, still). She had an interesting take on it — “Doesn’t make any sense to say ‘why me.’ If you say ‘why me’ in the bad times, why wouldn’t you say ‘why me’ in the good times?”

She didn’t want to move in with us. She wanted to stay in that cozy apartment, with its peek view, and her stack of movie tapes, till the end was truly in sight, and then she’d think about her HMO’s inpatient hospice.

So we visited her every day. A hospice nurse came in a couple times a week. I could see my mom’s apartment from my road to work early each morning, and was haunted by the thought, “Wow, until I call and check in with her later, she could be dead in there, for all I know.” Strange, but maybe if you’ve lived through a loved one’s slow death, you understand.

The cancer that kills most people within six months of diagnosis didn’t get her till she was into month 9. The hospice nurse who admitted her to the inpatient facility when it seemed clear she had “days to go” was shocked that she didn’t move on to the next plane of existence till she’d been there six weeks.

My mom’s death wound up teaching me a lot about life. So I pay tribute to her here on Memorial Day. Especially because she died this time of year — and the bush that yielded the rose I took from her hospice bedside vase, to lay on her chest, not long after her last breath, still blooms bright this time every year, right next to our front door.

Some people can’t wait for Christmas to get here. Not me. The holiday itself always makes me sad. I love Christmas lights more than any other feature of the season — but once December 25 arrives, it seems half the people who put them up, stop turning them on. I know they’re not out there on Christmas Day dismantling their displays, but suddenly they just stop bothering to go out back and plug them in, or whatever. Personally, I don’t believe in taking down the tree or deactivating the lights until after New Year’s Day. This is still a “holiday week,” even if you’re working. So here’s a shout-out to all the fine folks who “let it shine, let it shine, let it shine” until the day they box everything up again. Especially West Seattle’s boldest and brightest, the Menashes down on Beach Drive. (But what happened to Fauntlee Hills, over the ferry dock? We took a spin through their neighborhood this year & it seems to be a shadow of its former self.)

The Seattle Times Christmas edition features more than a bundle of after-Christmas-sale flyers — it also showcases a nice collection of local folks doing good. Among them, this guy. Trivial side note — nice picture of our west-facing shore behind him, too; so many people think West Seattle=Alki=downtown skyline views.

Honestly, this is intended to be a blog about West Seattle — what’s going on, and what’s not going on, on this side of the city, the quasi-peninsula that used to be a city all its own.

However, today, while this is still in stealth mode, we just have to say something about one of the “who stole Christmas?” controversies raging wildly across the Web.

The East Coast substitute teacher who revealed the truth about Santa Claus to a class of first-graders wasn’t all wrong.

“Those same children are going to know someday that what their parents taught them is false,” she explained, according to newspaper accounts. True. Exactly why we chose not to start the whole Santa mess with our kid, and honestly, we’re surprised more modern parents haven’t chosen to go that same route. Were we the only ones who felt betrayed when we realized we’d been deceived all those years? Did all the rest of you really just go “Oh, OK, whatever, fine,” when you found out? Didn’t it make you wonder what else your parents were lying to you about?

And yet … there is another side of Santa, also represented in the article we read about the East Coast controversy. One of the miffed parents mailed the substitute teacher a copy of “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus.”

To this day, we do believe in that Santa — the symbol of unconditional giving, and therefore love. That’s the Santa we taught our kid about, not the one that scratches up the roof, tumbles down the chimney, and cleans out the cookie jar.

Merry Christmas. No, we mean it. Not just Happy Holidays.

Much more to come …