Back from the church fair

Hoo... and now my room is officially the Christmas Angel's work room, with all the bags of surprises that are lurking in the corners. (Yes, the Christmas Angel comes to our house: I was terrified of Santa Claus when I was a kid, so we had to come up with a substitute gift-bringer at our house. Now that I'm [sort of] grown up, I grew out of that phobia, but I still don't believe in the big guy, but I respect those who do and especially those who haven't grown out of that belief) I can't give the details of what I got for everyone else, but for myself I got a small stack of CDs from the used book table, including two Christmas ones -- one of Byzantine chant for Christmas, the other of my all-time favorite piece of classical music for Christmas, Benjamin Britten's "Ceremony of Carols", which I sang years ago in a community chorus (It's as hard as hell to sing, but it's so lovely and for all the times we sang it over and over and over again in rehearsal, I still love it. Yes, I still remember the alto part for it, and yes, I sing along when I'm listening to it) -- and also Itzhak Perlman's klezmer collaboration CD "In the Fiddler's House"; since my ex-fiance was a Jewish convert to Catholicism who'd kept a lot of his heritage's traditions, I've developed a fondness for Ashkenazaic Jewish folk music, ie. klezmer.

Thus... most of my Christmas shopping is done except for getting a few things online. And ooh, I saw the first Christmas tree on a vehicle of the season today: an eight-foot balsam on the roof of a station wagon heading up Main Street as I was walking home. In years past, I've spotted the first Christmas tree on a vehicle earlier, but I've been inside working crazy hours or just too damned depressed to look out the window lately. And we might be getting the first big snowstorm of the season Monday night into Tuesday.

::Starts to sing "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas"::