Take that, old man!

My father is so proud of the port-a-pot they had across the street from their new house for a couple of weeks. But they never had one in their front yard like we do. At least it's out there during a cold spell. Imagine if we hadn't dawdled about getting the new porch under construction. So we see, once again, that procrastination pays.

Christmas Minus One

Better late than never - and since we heard in church this morning that the feast of Jesus' baptism marks the end of the Christmas season for Catholics, this one is gonna just squeak in under the not-to-late-to-post-about-Christmas rule.

Christmas 2010 was the first year we have celebrated without our intact nuclear family. Even though Rachel moved out long ago, she's always been with us or we with her for Christmas, whether in Columbia or Hautrage or Rochester. This year was different, with Rachel and Stephan staying in Rochester, and Becky and Sarah didn't like it. They decided that, since our family order is now immutably different, we also needed new traditions. So instead of waiting at the top of the stairs for the parental go-ahead to check out what Santa left, they came downstairs on their own. Instead of the ritual "open presents, pause for breakfast and to make monkey bread, and then open some more gifts," and in view of the smaller, more adult Christmases we'll now be having, they opted for opening all the gifts before preparing a big Christmas brunch - with no monkey bread. (We saved that for Repeat Christmas a couple days later with Rachel and Steve in Rochester.) It was a little sad for all of us to realize that life changes as the girls grow up and establish their own families. It made me think about how our parents must have felt the first time we didn't "go home" for Christmas because we'd realized it was time to start our own family traditions.

Life changes, but if we're lucky, it goes on. We hope that, as our girls move on to new phases of their lives, we will have the opportunity to share in the rituals and traditions they and their families establish.

And we wish all of you a happy and blessed 2011.

It's Not All Bad

Although I absolutely love Christmas in Europe, I willingly admit that there are some advantages to being here in the States for the season. For one thing, stores are open when working people can shop. Maybe the biggest advantage I've noticed, though, is that I have choices. I went to Target to buy Christmas cards and felt like a kid in a candy shop. I ended up buying far more than we need, simply because there were so many to choose from. I also marveled at the selection of wrapping paper, bags, bows, ribbons, tags, and tissue - all of which were in limited supply and of limited selection at our PX (and way too expensive on the economy). So while I'm missing the German Christmas markets, at least I have Target!

Le Coin belge

Several weeks ago I mentioned I was getting ready to paint the kitchen, hoping that lightening the color (it was a medium blue) would brighten the eat-in part. While it's still dark in my corner (I sit at the end of the table by the window), I'm pleased nonetheless with the result. For the first time ever, I managed to keep my wall-meets-ceiling lines straight. I realized some time later that the tape worked so well because I was taping a flat ceiling. The ceilings in most of the rest of the house are textured, so the tape doesn't adhere well. Be that as it may, here's what we have:

Our new beer glass cabinet features most of our Belgian and German beer glasses, plus a few particularly pretty Polish pottery pieces. The picture above the cabinet is one of the canal near our house in Belgium. On the other wall you see are my speculoos molds. These wooden molds are still used all over Belgium to make delicious cookies. I haven't had much luck with my much smaller mold - at least with getting a distinctive design on my cookies - but the cookies themselves were pretty good.

Along with the beer glasses and the speculoos molds you also see a Belgian lace curtain on the lower half of the window. This is a very common effect in Belgium and in many other parts of Europe.

I've dubbed this part of the kitchen "le coin belge" - the Belgian corner. It helps with the nostalgia for the good ole days in Belgium.

Worth checking out

One of our semi-adopted daughters is in France now. She has the gig as a high school English language assistant that I had 33 years ago. She's even in the same general area. She's blogging her experiences, and we've added a link to her site, Étang. If you like good writing, you might want to check it out.

Advent

This is what last year's Advent wreath looked like. We got it at the German Christmas market at SHAPE. In case we neglected to tell you, Germans do Christmas up right. And the Germans at SHAPE are no exception. To make sure no one has to go without their Christmas market, they take over the high school cafeteria and transform it into a magical wonderland of yummy things to eat and drink and these hand-made wreaths, which the German ladies put together. These wreaths are so popular that people - us included - race to get there as soon as the market opens because they sell out so quickly.

This year - maybe because we spent Thanksgiving week in Texas - Advent crept up on me and I was totally unprepared. At some point in our movings - either before we went to Belgium or before we returned - I apparently dismantled our trusty old wreath that had, admittedly, seen far better days. So this is all I could dig up from the bowels of the basement:

Pretty sad, huh? I think I need to go back to Belgium...

And The Paint Goes On

When we left our house in February 2007 the painter was in the process of painting most of it off-white. The walls in our house in Hautrage were all white. We came home craving color. We were also very taken by the color schemes we saw in the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, where vivid reds and yellows were highlighted. So we decided to try our own little Schönbrunn combo in the dining room.

The pictures are a little fuzzy but you get the idea. The framed item on the wall to the left of the china cabinet is a piece of embroidery we picked up in Bratislava. I loved the colors and the craftsmanship. It was only later that I got so attached to our neighbors' goats, so it is purely coincidental that this is a picture of a goatherd and some of her charges.

This big baby is a depiction of the Doudou festival in an earlier century. We knew we wanted this to be the centerpiece of the dining room because it's a huge poster. Plus the Doudou is like the center of culture in Mons. On the right-hand wall are three plates and a tile, more souvenirs from our travels. I didn't go about selecting them with this color scheme in mind but they all match beautifully. That is probably not coincidental, since I just like red.

Since this is a holiday weekend for us, I'm set to tackle another painting job: the kitchen. This one won't turn out as dramatic. Our primary objective for this project is lightening the eat-in part of the kitchen, which, after our fabulously large, light and airy kitchen in Hautrage, is dark and small. I'll let you know how it turns out.