Lions and tigers and..

..well no bears, but oh my!

Yesterday morning I was getting dressed for work and the shoelace on one of my work shoes broke.  I couldn't find a replacement, even though I'm sure I've got some somewhere.  Rather than spend a long time looking in less obvious places, I got out my more formally dressy shoes and wore those to work.

Since I was out near a local mall in the afternoon, I swung in there to go to the Rockport store.  I figured that even though shoelaces would be far cheaper elsewhere, I'd be able to make sure I got the right size since that's where I got the shoes.  It turns out Rockport stopped selling laces and stuff when they got bought out by Adidas or Nike or whoever owns 'em now.  Yeesh.  Fortunately, the tiny shoe shining/key making place in the mall had some that hopefully are the right size.

Okay, enough backstory.  So I was in the mall and since it's after Halloween, they're putting up all the Christmas stuff.  I was a little disappointed that the place being set up for Santa to sit is basically just a great big ad for the Polar Express, complete with a life sized statue of the conductor.  After passing that, I saw the animals...

First up was a moose.  I'm not sure when moose became associated with Christmas or even winter in general, but there he was in his life-sized plush glory, complete with some fake snow tossed on him and a squirrel perched between his antlers:




Then I came across what has to be one of the oddest winter/Christmas displays I've ever seen.
( It's behind a cut because I didn't want to reduce the picture size. )

In all honesty, I guess I do kind of like it better than some creepy elf statues and snowmen.  It's just kinda weird.