Some years, December comes in with the kind of snow we had before Thanksgiving. This year, rain as November ended and December began. El Niño?

I can’t pretend to understand exactly how that works, but I do defer to NOAA on the matter of the impact of El Niño on North America: “Seasonal outlooks generally favor below-average temperatures and above-median precipitation across the southern tier of the United States, and above-average temperatures and below-median precipitation over the northern tier of the United States.”

As a northern-tier location, so far we haven’t had below-median precipitation, but it has been warmer than usual. Suits me.

Other marks of the season, recently spotted in the neighborhood, include creeping Christmas lights. They started appearing just before Thanksgiving and have accelerated since. I expect a rush to put them up next weekend. The neighbors across the street have them up already. A few blocks away, someone did the full Griswold on their house, as a few people do: hundreds of lights everywhere, inflatables, glowing Santas, reindeer, elves, “Nutcracker Suite” characters, and a Nativity setup that might be visible from space.

It’s enough so far that I brought the lights in from the garage, for testing. That makes me ask all over again, how can simple strings become so tangled? Also, three of the four strings lit again after 11 months or so. One did not wake up, like the woman astronaut in the original Planet of the Apes.