Merry Christmas

I'm feeling much better. It's Christmas morning and I'm taking a 5 minute break for a quick update. We've had a couple of busy days. Neighbors dropped by on Friday night for drinks. Saturday night we had our annual holiday dinner with two other couples. This year I skipped the traditional standing rib roast, which I don't particularly care for, in favor of filet mignon with a Pinot Noir reduction--very nice, fast, and easy. Sunday we had dinner with my parents.

Yesterday I devoted almost the entire day to printing. It was great. I did two yards of cotton. Once is a deconstructed printing of circles. I have pictures of how great it looked before I washed it. I ended up with something entirely different. Most of the wonderfully strong colors are now pale pastels. I'm disappointed to have lost something that I loved on the print table, but what I got looks like it will be a great foundation on which to built something else. The other piece is overlapping blocks of color printed on top of soy wax applied with my new tjap. It's pretty and happy, but it also needs more layers. The camera's packed away, so pictures will have to wait until later this week.

Last night we went to church and didn't get home until midnight. In recent years the Christmas Eve service has become Christmas for me. It's a time that's completely out of sync with the rest of the secular season. It's entirely focused on the reality and the meaning of Christmas for Christians: the belief that God's love for humankind is so great that it manifested itself in human form at its most vulnerable, as an infant.

This morning we're off to New York to be with Dan's family for more celebration.

Merry Christmas to all of you! I hope that however you celebrate the coming of light into the world during this dark time of year it is marked by family, friends, laughter, and love.