All our festive decorations are back in style. The flags from parades make a fine patriotic, and now topical, display, so that people in our house for the first time don't think it's so peculiar to have so many little (for the most part) toy flags. Our red, green, and white traditionally shaped pinata is very holiday-looking and our strings of gold starts fit the season as well. Big Red Sun is selling bulk seeds in little Chinese good-luck envelopes. Now restocked is Korean parched or bamboo salt (bamboo salt = parched salt = jukyom = jook yeom This is made by roasting sea salt in bamboo cylinders plugged with yellow mud. The salt absorbs minerals from the bamboo and mud, which in turn leach the salt of impurities.). We might have acquired a Christmas tree, but nobody was at Rudolph's little lot yet and Albertson's coupon trees weren't yet set up. People are auctioning my Converse stars and bars patriotic high-tops and asking the same price as people are asking for brand-new ones.