Date: 2007-12-01 16:56 Subject: A strange & beautiful weekend... Security: Public Location: University Place Music: Chistmas Time is Here -- Gauraldi Tags: revels, solstice, yule

We decided to break out the christmas tree and deck the halls. No one has the christmas spirit like J -- it is a sparkly, magical world that can only come to this by not celebrating the holidays as a child and then making up for it like gangbusters later. It is a time of tinsel, incredible baked goods and lots of decorations. We put up the tree and it just starts snowing, right on cue like "White Christmas." We are a great combination -- I have that old Yule mistletoe, holly & ivy, ancient celt sensibility (all of my traditions sound like the name of a pub) and she has that childlike glee in anything that sparkles. And we may have found a decent chinese food joint -- we are going there tonight. What is christmas without chinese food?

I am looking forward to going to The Revels this year -- they are celebrating slavic traditions this year which will be awesome but they do this Yule mummers dance that is this slow winding thing of a ritual that requires reindeer antlers. I was reading about this place in England where they have been performing this ritual since anyone can remember. In their church, they are antlers on the wall that they use for the ritual. They think that the antlers are from the Viking occupation of this part of England. There was some carbon dating recently done on the antlers and some of them clocked in at a thousand years old. I love the winter. We are going up to the snow this year. It does snow here but we are going to Leavenworth, WA where it really snows and do some inner-tubing. They have a ski slope where they have a cable that pulls tubers up the hill.

Then there is the traditional scandinavian cookies that we make, Pepparkakor -- it is basically a really spicy crisp ginger snap. Traditionally, you have to have a cookie cutter of a goat, along with a star, a pig, the twins, a tree, a reindeer, etc. But the goat is a must. It is an animal associated with Thor, by the way. We found our goat cookie cutter in Poulsbo, a town up here on the Olympic peninsula settled by swedes.