I want to understand why an expression of the form

    (load-theme 'my-kewl-theme t)

fails<sup>1</sup> when run as the last expression in my init (`~/.emacs`) file, but works fine if I evaluate it as soon as soon as Emacs' startup is done.

How can I troubleshoot/debug this conundrum?

The only clue I have is that right before `(load-theme 'my-kewl-theme t)` is evaluated ***at the end** of the loading of `~/.emacs`*, the variable `custom-theme-load-path` has the value

    (custom-theme-load-directory t)

whereas after Emacs starts, it has the value

    ("/path/to/my-kewl-theme/" custom-theme-load-directory t)

I don't know what accounts for this difference.  (This variable is not referred to at all by `~/.emacs`, at least explicitly.)  The variable `custom-theme-load-directory` has the value `~/.emacs.d` throughout.

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<sup><sup>1</sup>``error: Unable to find theme file for `my-kewl-theme` ``</sup>