Snow!
All night, all morning, and part of the afternoon, too. It’s finally become pretty outside.

So, inspired by that and my newly rekindled health, I pulled out my Christmas decorations today.

Since I rarely have guests, and since I spend the actual holiday elsewhere, I don’t do too much decorating for the holidays. Last year, in fact, I did absolutely nothing. This year, I decided to pull out only some of my favorites and set them up for the next month.

I’ve been collecting creches for a few years now. Nothing too extensive, I just look out for them when I’m traveling. I’ve got seven at the moment, as you can see here:

My newest creche (from St. Petersburg):

My littlest creche (from the Vatican) (the wood to the right is the edge of another creche, to give you a sense of the scale):

My favorite creche (from Peru, bought at Ten Thousand Villages)

Rather than setting up the little fake tree stored in my closet, I got this cute little plant at IKEA last weekend, and set it up on my piano:

While I’m posting photos, here’s a few others that were on my camera:

Our carriage-ride tour guide in New Orleans:

The ladies out and about town
(The fellow in the photo above took this picture, after peering into my camera and saying “Smile, damn it!”)

Daddy-o hanging out at Preservation Hall (and browsing on his Blackberry):

When Janelle and I went to her classroom after auditions on Friday, we discovered this:

It seems the auditioners made us a mural out of their numbers.