Catchy Name Needed

I've had this picture on Flickr for a week or so but I know not everybody checks my Flickr stream regularly, so here is our balcony in the snow:



People who live places where there's snow on a regular basis probably already knew that the best way to get snow to show up was to set it against a dark background, but it took me quite a lot of trial and error to figure that out. (And hmm, that wreath actually looks real from a distance, doesn't it? It's not.)

I also have the other wreath (which nobody is likely to mistake for real) up on the front door - I don't think it's really meant to be an outdoor wreath, to tell you the truth, but it does alright. It gets sort of droopy when it's been damp, but I just fluff it up again. There are only a couple of pieces of holiday decor out inside yet - candles, and my mom's Christmas quilt is on the bed (although since we rarely make the bed, this doesn't add too much in the way of décor, either.) I get sort of fetishy about candles this time of year, so the candles made it out before anything else. In fact I did go to Ikea today, and it was basically to buy candles, because Ikea has this weird extra-large-tealight size of candles that I've never seen anyplace else. I don't really like regular tealights, they don't last long enough to suit me (although I did actually buy some today). So this gives me an excuse to go to Ikea occasionally, to buy the big tealight refills.

Oh, I have a piece of advice for fellow Ikea-lovers: don't wait until December to buy your Ikea Christmas decorations - because apparently they are not restocking things once they run out. The holiday section was looking sadly picked-over.

Here's another prompt from Holidailies: describe your holiday decorating techniques.

I'm not exactly sure I have holiday decorating techniques, per se, but that's not going to stop me from talking about them anyway. My whole philosophy of holiday decorating is different from how I feel about the rest of the year, and I think you can describe it succinctly as More is Better. More lights, more decorations, more of everything. Now I agree, it is possible to go overboard with this - we've all seen those houses that have so much stuff on the lawn they look like something out of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation - but I think on the whole the principle still applies. What's important at the holidays is the spirit of things, after all.

I have, historically, actually had a sort of color scheme for my holiday decorating, which fits in pretty well with the philosophy above. I collected Christmas ornaments for years, and when I got married in the late 80s what was in for decorating was the "country" look, and so half the stuff you saw at the holidays was dark dull red and antique-looking green, and white lights were the fad. So with my usual contrariness, I decided I wanted a tree that looked nothing like that at all. I only bought ornaments that were glitzy and bright-colored (any color, that didn't matter) and preferably metallic, and I had multicolored lights to go with that. I used to have hundreds of ornaments and strings and strings of garland and tinsel, and what I found was that the more of it you piled onto the tree, the better it looked. I'm sure it's possible to overdo there, too, but I never did think I got to that point. I used to love my trees so much - and spend so much time decorating them - that I didn't want to take them down, and they often stayed up well into January and I think at least once into February.

About every other year or maybe third year, I have to admit, I've been known to get Christmas fatigue and not want to put up the tree at all - and I just didn't. That's the beauty of being childless, if you don't feel like fooling with such things you aren't going to be disappointing anybody. I did worry sometimes that it bothered Rob, though - I don't think it did, though, or at least that's what he told me when I asked him. I'm lucky my husband is easy-going. (I suppose he has to be to put up with me!)

I have to admit that we haven't put a tree up this year, so far, although we do have all sorts of lights and other decorations going on. Last year we used the two small trees and I really liked them, but they were stored in the utility room, which got really wet during Ike, and both trees were wet and I think I was worried that the metal bits would start to rust and so forth, so I threw them out. I also threw out quite a lot of ornaments, so I'm not entirely sure what all I've got left. I know at least some of them survived. But I don't know, this year I don't really see a spot in the new apartment that begs for a Christmas tree, and we'd have to go buy one and everything, and I think this is just going to end up being one of the years where we blow it off. We make up for it with the other decorations, I think - we have two small (lighted but otherwise undecorated) trees in the bedroom where they show up through the French doors from outside. We have a battery-operated lighted wreath hanging on the balcony door which looks really pretty. And we have the solar LED lights draped over the railing, which are a bit unpredictable due (presumably) to the solar nature of the things, but which for the most part work fine. (One entire string has stopped working the last couple of days, but I think it was because its little solar panel had slipped under the railing and wasn't getting any sun. So I moved it, and we'll see tomorrow if that fixes it.)


(Tomorrow I'll finally have to write about Austin, I suppose. I've been avoiding it a bit, I'm not sure why!)