Apparently my 2-year-old son has been hard hit with a bout of seasonal affective disorder.

No, he doesn't seem depressed, and I've no plans to park a light box next to his Tickle Me Elmo. But it was 70 degrees outside today, and his room still sports a 3-foot-tall light-up snowman as its focal point. If that doesn't qualify as a seasonal disorder, I don't know what does.

If that were his only calendar-related quirk, I probably wouldn't give it much thought. After all, I'm not much of a stickler when it comes to punctuality. It's been about two weeks since the Easter Bunny hopped back to wherever he spends the off-season and I'm still using his treat-filled plastic eggs to bribe The Boy into finishing his fish sticks or picking up the approximately 4,721 Weebles currently scattered across the floor of the family room. I'm pretty sure last year's Halloween jack-o-lantern didn't make it into the trash can until darn near Thanksgiving, and if memory serves, a couple of our Christmas decorations didn't make it back up into the attic until they were belatedly discovered while prepping for Valentine's Day.

But those are my harmless foibles, and they can easily be explained away by a potent combination of forgetfulness and laziness. The Boy's reluctance to abandon his own personal winter wonderland is beginning to border on mania.

Take, for example, this morning, when he awoke from what must have been a holly jolly dream and insisted that I accompany him to the hall linen closet where, he assured me, Santa Claus was waiting for us. We opened the door to reveal the usual mishmash of pillowcases, sheets and blankets. Alas, no St. Nick.

"See, honey," I said, "it was just a dream. Santa Claus isn't in there."

The Boy peered suspiciously behind a stack of beach towels. "He might be hiding," he finally pronounced.

It's hard to argue with that logic, particularly at 6:30 a.m.

Father Christmas isn't the only seasonal character to hold year-round sway over my youngster. Snowmen are a big-time fixation, which explains both the giant plug-in Frosty currently serving as his nightlight and the little rubber snowman that adorns one toe of his Crocs sandals.

Neither of these frigid fellows can compete with his true obsession: the scarecrow that decorated our neighbor's yard last fall from mid-October to early-December. Apparently that six-week period was all it took for Mr. Straw Pants to burrow indelibly into my toddler's psyche, since rarely does a day go by without some mention of the scarecrow, his fashionably tattered clothing and his upcoming travel plans ("Scarecrow coming back, right, Mama? He come back at Halloween. Right, Mama? When he come back again? We see him then, right, Mama?").

Seeing how much solace The Boy takes from his off-season snowman, I've seriously considered approaching the neighbors with an offer to buy their scarecrow and give him permanent residence in my back yard, if only in the hopes of eliminating the daily queries as to his whereabouts. The main reason I haven't ­ other than the fact that my neighbors will think that I'm a complete whack job ­ is because I know it's a slippery slope. Right now I'm just the indulgent mom with the perennial shrine to scarecrows and snowmen, but all too soon I could become that kook who never takes down the Christmas tree or bothers to pull the Valentine's Day paper hearts off the front window. And to be honest, our neighborhood already has enough slackers who leave the holiday lights up all year.

But who knows? Maybe they're not simply too lazy to haul out the ladder and take them down. Perhaps they have an adorably obsessive toddler in the house who's as enthralled with twinkle lights as my son is with hay-stuffed lawn ornaments. Instead of rolling my eyes this July as I pass their still-bedecked eaves, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. For as Santa would say ­ if we could coax him from the depths of my linen closet ­ 'tis the season.