Christmas - All that's left is the memories!

Today was a picture-perfect winter day--blue sky, warm(ish) sun, temps up into the 30s.  It was a winter day like we never had last year until April!  I hear we need some snow though.  People are having trouble with their septic lines freezing up because the ground is so frozen so deep.  Always something!

 Here is the lake as it looks today.  On Sunday as we drove to Duluth, the lake was frozen solid out as far as we could see.  The windy conditions today have caused wave action that has broken up the ice out just beyond the pier.  Warm(er) temps, but cold winds.  It was a cold walk out on the pier!

And this is the channel looking to the southwest.  The angle of the sun on the refrozen ice made it sparkle like diamonds.

And here's a close-up of the ice.  And, no, people aren't allowed to try to get to the ice caves yet.  The camera shows ice in some of the protected bays near the caves, but warm days like this will slow down the big freeze needed to access them safely.

So, back to Christmas.  We undecorated the tree on Monday--always a bittersweet deal for me.  I'm sorry to put everything away but also kind of like the uncluttered, clean look that is left behind.  Besides, we need room for the jigsaw puzzle table!  Rather than try to move the very dry tree out the door to the deck, we used our giant Fiskars to cut off the branches while the tree was still in the house and in the stand.  Much neater!

But, as promised :-) here are some more of our decorations and their stories.

This manger scene has been in my family since way before I was born.  Little has changed with it as long as I can remember except for the ears, legs and tails of the animals have had to have repairs through the years, especially my younger years.

I always like to arrange the pieces of the fence around the whole scene.

The animals are so cute.  Can't blame a little kid for touching them, can you?

See the camel?  He's had the most repairs through the years, but he's still standing!

The peppermint candy in the middle came from a smocking class I took about 30 years ago in Redwood Falls with Jeanne K. back when I lived in the little parsonage on the prairie.   I think I branched out from little ornaments to smocking dresses for my little girls.  Fun!

 This little angel was given to me, and made, by my Sunday School teacher, Hazel Peterson, before I had was even started school.  

 This was a  Mom and Dad Christmas gift made back when I was in first grade.  It's a scene cut out from a Christmas card and glued onto a canning lid.  (My mother kept everything!)

This is a Leann creation of a piece of driftwood carved into a Santa Claus!

This was from my crocheting year, about 1982, I think.  It's crocheted, then I blew up a balloon inside of the crocheting, and then dipped it in a heavy solution of sugar water to make it stiff.   And it's still here all these years later.

And then there was my tatting year.  The hardest part of tatting is learning to "flip it" to get the tatting knot on the right thread.  I think I may have used starch to stiffen this one.  Not as sticky as sugar!

And, finally, my quilling year, actually I was quilling for a few years back then.  Quilling, if you're not familiar, is done by twirling thin strips of paper using a "quilling tool" to make designs large and small.  I couldn't create anything of my own but give me a pattern to follow, and I'm your girl!

So, here's to Christmas, 2014!  We were happy to share it with both daughters and their SOs for a few days.  We ventured into the making of lutefisk again with relative success, but how can one really measure lutefisk success.  I liked it and it brought back all the good memories, so I say it was good!  Thanks for sharing our Christmas with us!

Christmas - One more time

Part of what I never posted about in the last month was anything about Christmas.  I think I posted about getting the Christmas tree in from the meadow and then nothing.  And today, since the cold temps and high winds postponed our planned trip to Duluth, I spent part of today taking down and putting away SOME of the Christmas decorations.  The tree is still up, even though its needles fall to the floor just by looking at it!  Taking the tree down will be an Epiphany task on Sunday.

But, before things came down, I took a few pictures.  Actually, more than a few, so this will be a two-day post.

The picture below shows our entryway leading upstairs, but it was those nice red velvet bows that couldn't seem to stay attached to the banister that made it a little easier to give up and take it all down for another year.  Plus, I learned to label each of the ropes of fake greenery so it would be easier to know what goes where next year.  I already feel more organized!

This is the railing across our upstairs area with guest rooms on either side.  These red bows were also difficult to keep attached, but they got a reprieve for now and will be left up until Sunday.

Here is our tree in place and decorated.  I think it's about 10 or 11 feet tall, and we learned something this year that made the process of getting it into the house and set upright MUCH easier!  We measured it IN the stand while it was still OUTSIDE.  And we learned this because of what happened last year when we put it in the stand, wrestled it inside, realized it was too tall, wrestled it back outside while scratching a little hole in the patio door screen, sawed off a foot of tree, back in the stand and back in the house.  Things went MUCH more smoothly this year!

Here's the tree in the corner viewed from the balcony.  Yes, those are sunbeams streaming in the window.  Amazing to see but still cold outside!

And here are some odds and ends of decorations.  This is my little Swedish collection on the buffet upstairs by our guest rooms.  The two straw reindeer are Swedish Yulbock, sometimes called straw goats or straw horses.  I also have two more that are about a foot tall.  The little candle holders came from when I lived in Germany, and the dimensional Christmas tree candle holder has been in my life since childhood.  The cloth underneath it all has some typical Swedish designs on it along with the Dala horses in red.

 This is a three-generation scene!  The wooden sleigh came into my mother's life back in the '40s when she was first married.  The taller of the two trolls was a Christmas present I received back in the '60s when trolls were a big thing.  And the smaller troll caroler came into our household in the early '90s when trolls were enjoying a revival!

Remember when everyone was taking ceramics classes back in the '70s?  This ceramic Christmas tree was a gift from my college roommate, Pat, back in 1976.  I remember one Christmas when she spent any extra minutes hand-painting ceramic ornaments as gifts for off us in our dorm floor and all of her friends.  She would take her paints and bare ornaments up to the lounge away by herself, and like one of Santa's elves create her special gifts...and made it look so easy!

And finally, this might be one of my favorites.  These little ornaments are all about an inch tall and all so detailed and cute!  These came from a long-time Swedish gift & grocery store in Minneapolis called Ingebritsen's.  It's located on Lake Street in a neighborhood of Minneapolis that has seen several ethnic changes through the years and has been a constant presence there since 1921.  An area artist created these little ornaments and Leann would add more to my collection every year on my birthday.  That artist has died now, so I celebrate with these cuties every year.  I can't even say which is my favorite, but the cat sleeping in the bird feeder and the mittens would have to be right up there.

Guess that's all I'll bring to you today, but come back tomorrow for more!

Nighttime visitors & daytime Christmas tree treks

We've had our backyard feeding station set up for a couple weeks now.  Our first diners during the daytime have been bluejays...lots and lots of bluejays!  I don't know if they are staying for the winter or just passing through.  There are so many of them that they even keep the crows away!

But it's at night that things get interesting.  At first it was just all of the wind gusts blowing grasses and things that set off the motion lights outside.  Now in the last week there have been actual animal eaters causing the lights to go on.

These are two of the foxes that we've seen around here.  Our neighbor calls them cross foxes because they are gray with some red fur, too.  There are two here...one is hiding.

Not the sharpest pictures at night in low-ish light.  There's the second fox.

We first saw this big guy a couple weeks ago, just before hunting season.  And seeing him back a couple nights ago shows he made it through this year's "10 days of hunting."  He looks pretty big here but that other one was really very small, maybe from this summer's fawns.

He looks pretty healthy there.

Leann is home from Rochester now, it was a beautiful day, so we snowshoed up to the meadow to get our two Christmas trees--one for inside the house and a little one for the front porch.

We had tentatively picked this one a couple weeks ago, but there are always second thoughts when it comes time to cut it down.  We almost picked the white pine next to this one.  It was REALLY wide but needed a little more height.  So back into the pot for another year!  That's Leann peeking through the branches.

We tied two sleds together to have something long enough to haul them back up to the house.  That little "Charlie Brown tree" laying on top is the one destined for the front porch.  It was trying to grow in the shadows of some bigger trees, so it was a good one to get out of the way.

Down the hill, over the creek, and up the hill over to the house.

Guess what we'll be doing tomorrow?