A Vintage Xmas

Hello there!

I hope you all had a great Xmas. Mine was wonderful and vintage!

On Xmas Eve it was still 61F! In December in Quebec! I saw guys in shorts and ladies in t-shirts...and a lot of sockless folks.

I got raves for my tourtiere (meat pie) and ragout de boulettes (meatball stew). We all had a great time.

 Fog in Montreal

 Gifts! (we forgot to put away the bag of chips...)

It ended up being a running gag.

 3 new friends! I had the snowman in the store a couple of years ago and I always regretted selling it....

It was the first time I've seen the cute soldier. And how adorable is the reindeer?

 The mantle

Needless to say that with the heat we didn't make a fire!

 The village

 This was in my stocking. It comes from Russia.

The bag shows fries and ketchup. These are not fries...

These are stale bread chips with seasonings...you eat them with the ketchup!

It was disgusting! We had a laugh about that!

After all the excitement, it was time for a little

nap!

Be well and I hope to post soon!

Great Sunday

I love weekends where everything seems to glide and flow effortlessy....

Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about a lazy couch potatoey weekend but one where you suddenly get up from the couch and start taking care of business, slow and steady!

The meat pies are all wrapped up and frozen ready for future feasting. The burned out bulbs are replaced.

The basement door is insulated, the garden hose rolled up in the caddy (We bring the frozen hose down in the basement, let it defrost and rolled it up again so It is snug as a bug for winter).

Dan has been a busy bee cleaning out the basement and throwing away broken things. And I decided to start decorating inside!

 A nice and joyous winter scene....

                                      This is our new Xmas frame...It lights up!
                                             SWEET!

                                   As you can see Bandito is totally ignoring my decorating efforts!
                                   He is content to bask in the keyboard's soft heat....

I am now working on a blowmold scene.....Stay tuned!

Before Pyrex

Yes there was life before I discovered Pyrex! It seems that I've always collected stuff...it's genetic.

As a small girl there was the ladybug collection, the button and Barbie collection. One summer vacation in Portugal I would hoard all the sugar packets I could get my sticky little hands on....I would give some to an ant colony that lived in a tree in the yard of our hotel. I'm sure the owner was thrilled about that one.

There was the mineral bottle label collection in Italy. I had help from my Dad (my companion in hoarding). We would stick them in a little booklet much to my mother's dismay. I knew from her face that she found this sooooo distasteful. It was FUN!

The old glass medicine bottle collection, I still have that one, it's quite small. I've been strongly encouraged not to expand that one....

And the BIG collection before Pyrex....taking more room than Pyrex (could that be possible?).

The Dept 56 Xmas village collection! Actually this collection has 2 branches: The Dickens Village and the Original Snow Village. It all started in 1995....I was working downtown and not too far, in Old Montreal, was a Xmas boutique. OMG! It was quite exotic at that time here in Québec. Now you have some all over.

My Dad was definitely an enabler in that one too. We love them all but can't display all of them each year. So In late November, I go-a-digging and pull out a couple of pieces and make vignettes.

Makes me want to build snowman!

How about a warm bowl of soup?

I had 2 more tableaux but the lighting was really awful and no matter how hard I tried , the pics came out awful. So maybe next year!

So that's it for today, I gotta get ready for my dance lesson! Happy Sunday :)