Can I get JSON to load into an OrderedDict?

Yes, you can. By specifying the object_pairs_hook argument to JSONDecoder. In fact, this is the exact example given in the documentation.

>>> json.JSONDecoder(object_pairs_hook=collections.OrderedDict).decode('{"foo":1, "bar": 2}')
OrderedDict([('foo', 1), ('bar', 2)])
>>> 

You can pass this parameter to json.loads (if you don’t need a Decoder instance for other purposes) like so:

>>> import json
>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> data = json.loads('{"foo":1, "bar": 2}', object_pairs_hook=OrderedDict)
>>> print json.dumps(data, indent=4)
{
    "foo": 1,
    "bar": 2
}
>>> 

Using json.load is done in the same way:

>>> data = json.load(open('config.json'), object_pairs_hook=OrderedDict)

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