On Saturday, our friend Pamela--a photo classmate of mine at Ft. Mason--and her husband hosted their annual cookie decorating party at their beautiful home in Telegraph Hill. This was our second year, and we had such fun painting with colorful glazes and sprinkling with dots and sparkles other miniature bits. The cookies sparked imaginative conversations for a perfect December weekend.
For the past several years, I've been buying the annual Christmas ornament from the White House Historical society. I began collecting when I bought my townhouse in Virginia. One of my coworkers used to take orders for the office. Since then, I've kept up the tradition and bought them to remind me of my DC Christmases. Jeff and I like the historical themes. Each ornament honors a former president, and includes a discussion of life in the U.S. during that president's term. The ornament to the left is the first I collected. The one below is one of my favorites.
On a tree filled with glass decorations, one of my favorite ornaments is fake glass. I fondly remember making these pseudo stained glass ornaments with my mother and brother in the house where I grew up. In those days, our tree was mostly filled with things that Cliff and I made--blobs of felt, handmade frames with school photos, and melted stained glass. When Jeff and I spent our first Christmas together in San Francisco, my mother sent this ornament along to help start out our new tree.
I never thought that I would be one of those "ornament collectors", but each year when Jeff and I pull out our boxes of ornaments to decorate the tree, I am taken back to trips we've been on or font memories of family members. So, since most of my rabid readers are not in SF, I thought I would share a few of the stories that our tree tells.
Our annual Holiday Photo Show at Ft. Mason was a rousing success, once again. We had a continuous stream of people both Friday and Saturday, and moderate sales. (Moderate means some people sold a little, my dear friend Susan sold a LOT, and I didn't sell anything.) Nevertheless, the true measure of a good show is the positive feedback I receive from friends and strangers alike. Many many thanks to my friends who fought traffic and ravenous holiday shoppers to visit.
Time gets away from me each December. My excuse for not posting in over a week? Well, I did have a photo show, been decorating, doing Christmas shopping EARLY (well...earlier), went to a Christmas party, working on some photo projects, loading up my iPod with Christmas music.
