Christmas pics

Let me indulge myself in Christmas pics.

Here is our little tree.

The Resident Kid  and I go tromping into the woods to cut it down, so it tends to get smaller every year as I grow less and less enthusiastic about toting a Big Tree back to the car.
You may see various homemade decorations prominent upon it.

The big thing hanging behind it is a gilim, which is a woven tapistry rug.  This one comes from the hills up near the Caspian sea.  There are lots of funny, stiff little animals woven into it.

Continuing to indulge myself . . . (if I can't indulge myself on my own blog, where can I?)

This is the central portion of a creche that's spread out all along the mantlepiece.
Major players here. 

We got all kinds of animals in the creche, some of them oddly small or large in comparison with the others.  A bunch of these are hand-carved and painted.
The animal front and center, among all those chickens and ducks, is -- I think -- a hedgehog.

Behind the hedgehog there's a little carved dog and a pair of cats hugging each other way in back.  We got those someplace when I was a kid, but I don't remember where.  They are not terribly cat-like cats, but they're the only cats we got and I like cats, so they get to go in close.
I think the weird turquoise-coloured goose all contorted up in the back came home from China during WWII.

The guy with the basket of eggs, (what is a chicken farmer called?  A chickherd?)  and the shepherd with his five or six sheep,
(you can't see him because he's out of the picture to the left,) 
get to be closer to the manger than the Three Kings.
We're very egalitarian in our creche.