Christmas

Yes, this is a little late. And you can expect your Christmas cards sometime in mid-July.

I took some pictures of a hotel here for my sister Jancy, and when I downloaded them I found all these shots taken around Christmas and New Year's that I had forgotten about. So...

I've mentioned that we do almost everything by bike, right? Well, that includes getting the Christmas tree.





So we go it home and up the three flights of stairs. It took about a week to get it decorated, but we finally did.


What you can't see from the picture is the base of the tree. The trunk is basically still just nailed to two pieces of wood to hold it upright. The guy we bought the tree from said it was a special type of tree. He guaranteed us that it would keep its needles until January 8, without watering.
By Dec. 24, he left the Church plaza where we had bought the tree from him. By December 25th, when the tree was completely dead and dried out and the needles started falling, he was nowhere to be found.
Still, it was a good first tree.



Ian's parents came and spent the week with us. This is them after Christmas dinner, walking along the deserted Oudegracht canal with the Dom in the background. I had never seen this area so deserted. It was really beautiful.



We also went to a park, which inexplicably has hundreds of chickens and roosters roaming freely around. There is nothing keeping them in the park, yet they see to stay there.

This was taken of us all just before they left.


And finally, Ian, contemplating how we were going to get rid of the tree.