O Tannenbaum

Yes, I have my Christmas tree up in my apartment, though moved from its original location. At first I had it on the floor in a corner since I had no table to place it on. After I received the generous gift of furniture from the friend of a neighbor I suddenly had another option. You can see from this picture that the tree (3") is on a table right next to my couch. I think that it looks much better there, and it is much easier to plug in the lights. I also have my village set up and hopefully will put up pictures of that later. I only wish I'd been able to put up some of this stuff earlier so that I could enjoy it longer. Christmas is almost here!

Speaking of Christmas, I had quite a bit of fun in California. Not only did I go with one nephew to the bookstore at the library (and bring back a dozen books) but I helped my nerfs make Christmas cookies! The only bad thing was that we didn't have time to finish decorating all of the cookies, but we had fun with those we could get to. You can see some of them here.

This was always one of my favourite parts of the season growing up. For many years we couldn't get the sugars in the west so one of my uncles used to procure them in Michigan and send them to us. I always delighted in decorating weird things, like purple and orange shirts on gingerbread men. :-) I also had fun with many different shapes because each year my parents would give me a cookie cutter in my stocking. I brought all of those back home with me at the end of the trip as well as other items.

I think I mentioned that my Grandma is visiting with my parents now. Whenever she is staying at their house she loves to enjoy fires in the fireplace (that will be one of the things I'll miss most about my parents moving--leaving the wonderful fireplace). Needless to say we enjoyed several fires over the weekend, including the one that I snapped below. I've tried taking pictures of fires with a flash before and it just washes out, so I have to hold the camera extremely steady and turn the flash off. There is a slight trade-off with clarity and crispness, but on the other hand I'm not sure how important those are when documenting open flames. I just think the pictures are fun.

~Matt