Christmas Lights

 

Both the Geek and I are not big into Christmas. Of course, as long as Kaefer was with us, we celebrated it and I also used to decorate the house. We had a Christmas tree that Kaefer and I decorated, a Christmas village (that Kaefer later sold for more funds during college) and the traditional wooden figurines from the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains in East Germany) that I unfortunately cannot find anymore. I suspect it's in a box up in the attic and I certainly won't go there anytime soon. We had an entire angel orchestra - it looks like this:

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Thankfully I still have the Kurrendesänger (carolers) because they are in our grab-and-go box. These are the ones that we had when I was a child. They were sent to us by a family in East Germany whom we always sent packets during the years when Germany was divided into two countries. This is my favorite Christmas decoration.

I was glad that I found the Schwippbogen, also handcrafted in the Erzgebirge. The candles are made of beeswax and almost doll sized, thus very hard to find around here. One of my students gives me a package of them every year, so that I don't run out.

The only "big" thing in terms of Christmas decorations are the lights on our home. The Geek and Kaefer used to put them up together, but now the Geek has to do it alone. And he does a great job.

We don't call them Christmas lights but winter lights since they stay up at least until Valentine's Day. They make our rather dark corner cheerful and people who walk along here really like that it is not that dark in those early winter evenings. At 10 o'clock at night the lights are switched off and turned on again in the morning at six for 90 minutes.

The Geek really goes to town with these lights - they are all around the fence as well and even grow into the lower parts of some trees. The best part? These are all LED lights and consume about 100 watt of energy (as much as just one of those old 100 watt lightbulbs) and they're all connected to only one outlet.

This is for Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date with this week's prompt "Christmas lights". Foodwise I don't have much to show today. Our wonderful bread baker has been sick for several weeks and we're running out of bread (we always buy several loaves from them at the farmers market and freeze them), so I decided to bake our own bread again. I didn't take a photo of the first one, but remembered to take one of the second, a whole wheat bread with sunflower and pumpkin seeds.

I didn't cook any elaborate meals for dinner, just linguine with fresh spinach, cream and cheese. It's quick and delicious.

My last photo today is my morning view from the window at the top of the stairs. I love when the fog still hangs around and is slow to lift. It has such a lovely, dreamy atmosphere - my favorite morning mood.