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Finally managed to take photos of the David Jones Christmas Windows in Sydney.
The windows are typically unveiled on the 1st November each year and are a marvel of animation and music.

Visit the photos here David Jones Christmas Windows

It's a bit close to Christmas, but the site got updated today.

For the geeks, it was kind of necessary, as the spammers had been active again, plus I'd changed hosting companies and ended up with a more recent version of PHP which wasn't compatible with my old Drupal site. So it got updated to the latest version, which was a very big upgrade. Some bits haven't made it across, as the database was also too large and bloated by spam and multiple plugins to even download via phpmyadmin, so lots of things got ditched.

The Lights of Lobethal is a Christmas festival that has been lighting up the Lobethal Valley in the Adelaide Hills (South Australia) for over sixty years... created by the community of Lobethal. In the true spirit of Christmas, a tradition that has continued for over 60 years began, and has now evolved into the largest Community Christmas Light Display in the Southern Hemisphere.

Lobethal lights up on Sunday December 12th and the festival continues until the 31st of December 2010.

The glossy  (sydney) magazine that comes out once a month in the Sydney Morning Herald, had a lovely article on one of the best Christmas Lights streets, in last week's issue.

On the first Saturday of Devember, the street turns on its Christmas lights and becomes a fairyland of flickering lights, reindeer and elves.

The article had interviews with some of the founding families on the street, and stories on how it all started, and how it has grown over the years.

The David Jones Christmas Windows have been on display since the beginning of November.

I've just uploaded photos of each window to the Shop Windows photo gallery: http://christmas-australia.com/image/tid/17

Just spent 4 hours deleting a gazillion spammers, and their comments and forum posts. When I really should have been taking the dogs for a long walk.

About 100 spammers per day were creating accounts and writing spam, post rubbish and fake ads that added no value, and it was taking far too long manually deleting all the differrent types of rubbish. I even had to turn off membership for a week, to catch up.

Now there are two levels of membership. Both are still free, but the advanced one is for proven non-spammers.

Last weekend was pretty big.

A dress rehearsal on Friday, a house auction Saturday morning, a ball Saturday night and Halloween on Sunday.

We were in town for the dress rehearsal, and noticed that David Jones had big sale posters in their windows, instead of the usual window displays. But if you peeked behing the posters (which were just stuck on the outside window), you could see the Christmas displays being built behind.

And sure enough, on Monday morning, the Christmas windows were out.

As soon as I get in town again, I'll  take pictures.

My favourite Christmas present this year was from my youngest son.

He likes to make things for us, and also likes to leave it to the last minute.

So on Christmas Eve afternoon he was running around, asking if I had a blank audio CD anywhere. I only had DVDs - I mean we all just email stuff these days, or use a USB key to transfer stuff. He wouldn't tell me what he wanted it for - there was no mention of presents.

PNC Christmas Price Index has its annual costing of the items sung about in the Twelve Days of Christmas carol.

This year its an extremely (and possibly over-) cutesy video of young kids acting out the various characters - i liked the lords a leaping. I was tempted to give up, it was so sweet, but it only takes a minute.

This year the total was $21,465, up from last years $21,080.

Ryan's Christmas Lights were turned on at the beginning of December as planned.

Ryan's Christmas Lights are regularly voted the best Christmas Lights in Adelaide, (if not South Australia), and are well worth checking out. It's a serious business - this year there are 26,000 lights, computer-controlled, and synched to music.