And I expect it will continue to do so for the next three weeks, or until we drop dead from exhaustion, whichever comes first.
Was Thanksgiving weekend just a week ago? It seems much farther away, I suppose mainly becauJse we took down our few Thanksgiving decorations and put up the Christmas stuff so quickly. My theory is: get the tree done as soon as possible, or it doesn’t happen at all.
Jeffrey was most interested in our creches — for the past several years, we have gone down to Ten Thousand Villages and picked out a nativity set from a different country. So far, we have creches from Peru, Indonesia, Maylasia, and Germany (uh . . . we found that at a thrift store). This year, we picked out a lovely one made of Kishi stone from Kenya.
All of this extra color and diversity must have inspired Jeffrey, because he immediately went to his room for a while before reemerging with a creche made of Legos. Joseph is a little Lego person inside, but he couldn’t find any more Lego people for Mary and Joseph, so they are represented by a flower topped with a yellow brick.
A flower — I am especially fond of this detail, since one of my favorite Christmas carols is “Lo, How A Rose is Blooming.”
Speaking of which, Eleanor is delighting in dancing around to the various carols and yuletide melodies I plunk out at the piano after dinner most evenings. When she isn’t dancing, she likes to sit on my lap and watch.
Funny thing is, no matter what I play — from the Nutcracker Suite to “Go Tell It on the Mountain” — she points at the music and says, “When I was a little girl, I learned how to sing this song in Spanish at my preschool!”
Oh, when she was a little girl, indeed!