Tagged With: Decorations

Christmas Lights (But Not Ours)

Photograph taken on Wednesday, December 06, 2017 by Henry
Christmas Lights (But Not Ours)

Christmas Lights (But Not Ours)

I took pictures of some of the Christmas lights in our neighborhood this evening. Pictures of lights at night is a bit tricky, trying to balance the blackness of night with the very bright points of light, which tend to turn white unless you are careful. Then, the in between parts, that should have some light, tend to get a bit too dark. I’m reasonably happy with the way this one turned out. Just so there is no confusion, this is not our house and these are not our lights. We’ve been a bit overwhelmed with everything else that’s going on and Christmas decorations are a bit beyond us right now.

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Christmas Beads

Photograph taken on Monday, December 24, 2018 by Henry
Christmas Beads

Christmas Beads

As I mentioned a little while ago, we didn’t do a lot of decorating for Christmas. We put up the artificial tree, which already has lights on it, and I put up the Peruvian nativity scene on the piano. Other than that, not much. A few days ago, Cathy and Dorothy added a little to the tree. Mostly this included garlands of sparkling tinsel and a few long strands of red and gold glass beads. This is one of the strands of gold, and I like the way it shines in the light of the tree lights. This will almost certainly be the last of my Christmas decoration pictures for the year. Tomorrow we’ll celebrate Christmas first at our house and then at mom’s apartment.

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Peanut Creche

Photograph taken on Monday, December 16, 2019 by Henry
Peanut Creche

Peanut Creche

This little creche is made with bits and pieces from the kitchen. Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus are peanuts with Halos made from Cheerios. The magi—or maybe those are angels, it’s in some dispute—are made from Hershey’s kisses. The sheep are pumpkin seeds with broken toothpicks for legs. I’m not entirely sure what is in the foreground. Perhaps that’s food for the animals (and the baby didn’t fit in this manger so he’s next to it instead. The yarn person, which is perhaps a shepherd, is not to scale but is definitely part of the composition. The frog, however, is almost certainly apocryphal.

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Our Christmas Tree

Photograph taken on Thursday, December 19, 2019 by Henry
Our Christmas Tree

Our Christmas Tree

We put our Christmas tree up this evening. I know a lot of folks have a tradition of putting their tree up the weekend after Thanksgiving and I have no problem with such a tradition. Nevertheless, we’re not quite so organized and in any case, the tree was in the storage unit and I didn’t get it until early December. It’s been in the back of my car for a while and this afternoon I brought it in and we set it up. Dorothy and Cathy brought up some boxes of decorations and began decorating the tree, although it isn’t done yet. There are a few boxes that were in storage and I will need to stop there and pick them up before we can consider it finished. Nevertheless, the living room is finally starting to look a lot like christmas. The large nativity scene will also need to be set up, probably on the top of the piano. Dorothy is also planning to make a wreath to hang on the front door. Note that in the past, our tree has stayed up until it really begins to lose needles. Now that we’re using an artificial tree that we brought from Margaret’s, that’s not an issue any more. We’ll probably take it down in early January, anyway. Note in this photo, the traditional peanut butter in front of the tree.

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Christmas Morning

Photograph taken on Wednesday, December 25, 2019 by Henry
Christmas Morning

Christmas Morning

Christmas morning, otherwise known as the calm before the storm, was nice this year. Santa obviously came and left a lot of things under the tree. He also seems to have finished the puzzle that we were working on. I guess he must have been ahead of schedule and wanted to take a break. It was mostly the sky that was left for him to do, which was the hardest part of the puzzle. Naturally he ate the cookies that Darius left out for him and he the pieces of carrot that were left for his reindeer were also gone, so they seem to have gotten their treat. As you can see, in addition to all the presents under and around the tree, there was one that Dorothy “wrapped” that’s hanging on the wall. Needless to say, this didn’t stay looking like this for too long. But we did have breakfast before diving into all the gifts.

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Christmas Tree

Photograph taken on Thursday, December 24, 2020 by Henry
Christmas Tree

Christmas Tree

I think I mentioned a while back that we put up our Christmas tree earlier this year than normal. We put it up on the weekend after Thanksgiving, which for a lot of folks is traditional. For us, we generally would cut a tree and putting it up that early is asking for a lot of needles to be down by Christmas. For the last three Christmases we’ve used this artificial tree, so that’s really not an issue. The plan is to keep it up a little while longer, but of course, it won’t have the wrapped presents under it after tomorrow.

We may have gotten the tree up early but we didn’t really do as well buying gifts this year as we generally do. There are a lot of packages under the tree but a lot of them are food gifts. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but we generally try to do better. Still, we’re together and looking forward to our two Christmas meals (breakfast and dinner with enough to eat that we won’t be hungry between them). We also plan on having video calls with our two families tomorrow.

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Christmas

Photograph taken on Saturday, December 25, 2021 by Henry
Christmas

Christmas

It’s Christmas. This year, like last year, Christmas has been attacked by Covid-19 (a.k.a. the Wuhan Flu). Last year was really quite bad, with our larger family get-together being replaced by a Zoom meeting. It really wasn’t what it should be. This year things are at least a little better, although they are worse than they looked like they would be even a month ago. With what appears to be a much more easily transmitted (although apparently much less severe) strain on the loose, we decided we should all self-administer antigen tests before we got together. Thankfully we were 16 for 16 negatives and no one had to stay home. Annoying but much better than last year.

As usual, we had our immediate family Christmas (just Cathy, her mom, Dorothy, and me) at our house. That included a large breakfast and then some presents from under the tree. Then we went to Dorothy’s house for the extended gathering. All of her housemates were out of town, so we were able to enjoy their large house and it all worked out quite well. Hectic but nice. And certainly better than last year.

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