Sunday, December 26, 2010

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.

6 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing some of your Christmas traditions! In case you haven't seen it, Cultural Gutter has Forbidden Rose listed among its top ten romances of 2010. I never know whether or not to supply links in comments. You can get to the site by typing "the" followed by culturalgutter.you know what's next. *g* Chris Szego wrotes on Romance. As usual, you're in very good company!

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  2. Hi Annie --

    Oh my. You're right. What kind things Szego says about Forbidden Rose.

    And Forbidden is in Wonderful Company company.

    Let me give that whole list in a posting so folks will get linage.

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  3. "wrotes on Romance" was a nice touch. I'm going to blames cooking, baking, and cleaning for Christmas. It were exhausting.

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  4. The Yuletide . . . season of dyslexia.

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  5. Carol9:26 AM

    Very nice pictures. i got a smallish tree this year too - very Charlie Brown. but it's beautiful. (and cat proofed as best as can be) also like the creche with all the animals...

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  6. Hi Carol --

    I figger the tree 'idea' is the important thing. It's an appreciation of the strength and beauty of the natural world.

    When we lived in the Middle East and Africa we'd go out and collect a 'Christmas branch' -- A palm tree frond or something -- and hang paper decorations on it. *g*

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