Christmas. Here already.

You can feel the onslaught of darkness beginning to descend around 3pm in Edinburgh these days. Yes, we are well and truly into the winter months in Scotland now. However, there's no snow. No ice storms or freezing rain (are these one in the same?!). No winter storm warnings, no storm team 8 extreme weather watch (keeping YOU informed of all the most important weather changes!). Nope. Mostly it's windy, dull, and damp.

And the pre-Christmas madness has also descended on Scotland. Princes Street, the main shopping street in Edinburgh is busy enough at the best of times, but now it is positively nuts. People everywhere. Shoving. Pushing. Buying. I have to say I have been rather taken aback by the Christmas madness here. You see, we don't have a Thanksgiving holiday in Scotland (for obvious reasons...) so we go from Halloween, straight into Christmas. It's weird.

The other odd thing is the lack of availability of religious Christmas cards in regular stores. The UK has become so secularised that you have to go to special shops (usually charity stores such as Oxfam) to get cards with Christian references to Christmas. Not that this is a bad thing - sending charity christmas cards is what one does here. Usually at least 10% of the purchase goes to a designated charity. No bad thing.

I will be blogging more about Christmas in Scotland as time goes on, but I hope this serves as a taster for now!