Shorter Days and the Christmas Season

The hydrangeas at Savill Garden are a beautiful sage green now. In July, they looked like this.

We still are having a hard time adjusting to the short days. Officially, the sunrise is at 7:31 AM and the sunset at 4: 06 PM. However, the sun really feels like it’s setting around 3:15. By 4:30 it is pitch dark. By 6:00, we’re ready to go to bed, but we find if we can get over the 8:00 hump, we can stay up well past midnight.

So, I know today (at least in America) is the official opening of Christmas season. I must say we always tried to avoid the malls during this particular weekend.

The Christmas decorations and seasonal merchandise have been up for weeks here. Some interesting things include: black, purple and pink artificial trees (not all three colors at once), large 5′ feather trees that look like they are made with really thin feather boas. How do you decorate those things? There are some lovely branch-only trees with LED lights at the end. And large fiber optic trees that change color. And fairy decorations. And an animated reindeer head that sings “Sweet Home Alabama”. Hmm. Well, it is certainly interesting to window shop

Savill Garden’s shop has a beautiful assortment of natural material ornaments. A lovely little red glittery bird joined my menagerie (well there is only the raven and the red bird for now)–she sits in the “chandelier” in my studio area.

We’re not going to do a tree here this year. After this busy week coming up (production week), I will start packing up our house. I want to be finished with the majority of the packing before we head to Texas for the holidays because when we come back to England in January, it’ll be time to move into our new place.

NaNoWriMo Word Count Update: 36,263 words out of 50,000. The end is in sight!