The season starts - below the belt!

Today's Guardian has a feature on the increasingly early arrival of Christmas in the shops - when it's only the first week of October. This may seem a valid complaint, but I have to confess that we mistletoe enthusiasts have been secretly preparing for Christmas for months...

Plans for the Mistletoe Festival and the new National Mistletoe Day are progessing well. The Mistletoe Ball is booked, the Druids are planning to bless the mistletoe at this year's mistletoe market. And although the new mistletoe website is still on the drawing board - the Tenbury English Mistletoe Enterprise (TEME) website is well underway - going live soon. And we're off to France soon to look at the mistletoe in Brittany. So, the Christmas season is well underway already for mistletoe-lovers...

And the mistletoe season is beginning to happen for the rest of you too - I see an enterprising company in Texas has just launched a high-profile TV ad for the Mistletoe Belt Buckle - "the perfect gift for the man, or woman, looking to be a hit below the belt". Hmm... There's nothing new in selling Mistletoe Belt Buckles, they've been around for years (just trust me on this one) but a TV ad?? This is a must-see - and indeed you can see - click here to go straight there (you'll need Quicktime) or just browse www.mistletoebeltbuckle.com, where you also buy suitably tasteful (is that an appropriate word here?) tee-shirts depicting the impact of the MBBuckle.