A few photos

 These are the more ephemeral things from my trip. I didn't do a lot, but maybe I needed this time to rest up and to sort-of heal from the past several years (grief, pandemic, trying to to teach online suddenly and with little logistical support, and then the ongoing effects of doing partly-online, having students stressed and not completely prepared, etc.)

We had a Christmas tree (I posted this earlier, in the one post I tried writing on my phone - which is not fun, the keyboard on an iPhone is really too small)

We got the little LED lights this year - we had been using the old C7s (and a few of the neo-bubble lights that were made in the 80s/90s) but I was concerned given how dry some of the branches looked that that wouldn't be safe. (As it turns out, I was probably wrong - I cut a slab of the trunk off to fit it in the stand, and that seemed to open the vessels back up, and the tree did take up quite a lot of water.)

There you can see a variety of the ornaments. At the very top right is an old ball, probably from the 1940s, that came from my dad's parents. I think that's the one that says "Merry Christmas" on it; the other one we have has a little scene of the Three Wise Men (in silhouette) and "Silent Night" on it. Just below that is a little mouse choirgirl (angel? she has a lyre but is wearing what looks like choir robes) that I think my dad bought me from BEST stores when I was a kid - a number of our ornaments came from there (The teapot in the center of the photo did). Just below it is one of those satin balls wrapped with a scene of a mouse in his house, with a chair made out of a spool, things like that. 

I also baked cookies:

This is a new recipe, for butter cut-outs from a cookie magazine I bought this year. It's very good and didn't make quite as many as the old recipe I'd been using (it was hard to use all of those up). 

I also got to the tea place a few times. Bubble tea is a treat.

We did stockings. I'm glad I thought to run to the local-to-me gourmet shop a day or two before leaving and get a few small things (a boiling stone, a tin of beeswax hand salve, a little jar of fancy jam, some fancy coffee) to put in my mom's stocking; she got me a few small things but of course with my dad gone, there's no one but me to get things for her:

These aren't the original ones we had when I was a kid; they're replicas of them. Sometime in the mid 90s (when I was living with them in grad school, and my brother was still at home), a mouse got into the box where the original stockings were, so that year my mom bought felt-off-the-bolt and made new ones for all of us, with as much as possible the same decorations as before. And she made one for my sister in law when she and my brother married, and then made one for my niece (they have theirs now; they spend Christmas at their own home). 

I did do some knitting; that will come in a later post. 

And the Arch, coming back last night: