The holly, just like in the Christmas carol. No ivy here, though. I can’t stand the stuff; it doesn’t know when to stop trying to cover everything in its path. Do you have a tree? Ivy will happily swarm up the trunk and smother the branches. What about a house? Not a problem – ivy will get to work on turning it into a green hill, if you don’t fight back.
Ivy. Bah, humbug.
…is unusual this year. Not because it’s also New Years’ Day – New Years’ Day is always exactly a week after Christmas.
No, what’s out of the ordinary is that this is one of the times that Christmas and New Years’ fall on a Sunday – something that only happens every six years…or every five years…or every eleven years. (Of course, they both fall on a Monday, or any other day of the week, at similar intervals.)
2016 is nearly over. Tomorrow we’ll start a new year, and the Mummers will be parading through Philadelphia again.
…it wasn’t all that cold. Well, not if you believed the thermometer. But then there was the cold, cold wind…the kind of wind that makes you feel like you have ice cubes on the sides of your head instead of ears. Santa would have been comfy, though.
…well, all right, most people get their cookie baking done before Christmas Day. But even those of us who almost never bake cookies tend to make a few, at least, at this time of year.
Have a piece of nut cake!
(Back during the Great Depression, my Grandma Heisey baked this as a Christmas treat for her six children, her husband, herself, and a varying number of hired hands. It’s still good.)
…okay, it needs to come down soon, but for now it’s still pretty.
Suburban wild turkey
and two more
A Number of Things 