I should have mentioned this earlier, as we are already more than halfway through autumn—but perhaps you’ll channel your “It’s getting dark so early”/”The flowers have all died”/”It’s too soon for Christmas lights but I WANT THEM NOW” energies into putting things on this year’s holiday/birthday wish list so you’ll have them next year. The best time to plant a tree, etc.

This is Swistle’s Fall Lighting Pack, brought to you by an assortment of Swistle’s Dear Friends. (Inspired by their genius, I have since made gift sets of these three items to send to other friends with Seasonal Issues. Fall is my favorite season but it comes with a feeling of sliding into the abyss.)

First, the flameless candles I know I have mentioned before (these were given to me as a housewarming gift by my wine-and-appetizers friends):

(image from Amazon.com)

I feel like the product image makes them look kind of cheesy, when in real life they are just so nice. They are made of real wax, which I think makes a difference. Also, it means that if you drop one, as I did, it may crack, as wax does—so I now have 1-2/3rds sets, because I bought another 3-pack. And I have had them for several years and ONLY THIS YEAR realized that if you use the “timer” function on the little remote, they will turn off automatically AND ALSO TURN BACK ON AGAIN AUTOMATICALLY. So, like, if at 4:30pm I use the 6-hour timer button, they will shut off at 10:30 pm and then come back on the next day at 4:30. What I don’t understand is how this eluded me before, since it happened on its own this year; perhaps I hit an additional button? perhaps in earlier years I shut the candles off manually instead of using the timer? Who can say. Anyway, these range in price: I have seen the 3-pack as low as $13ish and as high as $29ish. (I bought my second/replacement set when they were $13-something and I could no longer resist.)

Second, the leafless lit birch trees, which I just realized I bought for myself. I was about to say a dear friend gave them to me, but it was that a dear friend RECOMMENDED them to me, and I bought them on her recommendation—but I think of them as being From Her:

(image from Amazon.com)

(Again, I feel the product photo does them a disservice. And what is that wall behind them, is that a shower wall?) It took me about a year, I think, to order them after the friend recommended them, even though she was FERVENT in her recommendation: along the lines of “Trust me: you need these in your life.” And still I hesitated! Well, never again. When the Autumnal Lighting season is over, I plan to keep them up but decorate them with teensy Christmas ornaments. These go up and down between about $21 and $35 for the 2-pack. And THEY TOO have a timer function: if you press the little On button twice at, say, 4:30pm, they will come on for 6 hours every day at 4:30pm and go off at 10:30pm. (Or you can hit the On button once and they will stay on until long after you go to bed and forget to turn them off.)

Third, a gift from the same friend who fervently recommended the birch trees, which is probably why in my mind she also gave me the birch trees: maple leaf string lights.

(image from Amazon.com)

Clearly it is just very, very difficult to capture the magic of a lighted item. I have two different strings of these because my friend put the two options in her cart to decide between them but then accidentally placed the order, and it is fate: I have the long string in the living room, where they drape around the curtains and decorate the television, and the shorter string tucked around my desk. I think the lowest I’ve seen them is $7/string for the short ones (and they will range up toward more like $10), and $13-14 for the long ones (ranging up toward $20). There are a bunch of other sellers, too, if you want different lengths or more functions, and let’s just leave that unintentional double entendre where it lies. We are grown-ups here. Snickering grown-ups.

Also. These items ALL take batteries. The maple-leaf lights take two or three AA batteries, depending on what type of string you get. The trees take three AA batteries each. The candles take two AA batteries each. It’s LED lighting so the batteries last quite awhile, but it’s still a lot of batteries. So this year I have added rechargeable batteries back into my life. (It seems like for a long time now practically everything has been rechargeable via USB cable.) I bought this Energizer charger at Target (you can also get it on Amazon):

(image from Target.com)

And I bought four more AA batteries (the charger comes with four) before noticing that the charger-with-four-batteries is only a dollar more than just the four batteries, and more chargers means more charging. So I have another charger-plus-four-batteries in my cart right now, and will likely end up getting TWO more. (This is an old house, and it is clear to me that every time they did a remodel there was someone who said “WE NEED MORE OUTLETS,” because we have more outlets than you might expect in a 200-year-old house.)