christmastime is here

Yesterday Aaron spent several hours organizing all our spices. Our apartment is now an even happier place to be!

We also got out our Christmas stuff. For me, there has always been a very strong line drawn between things that are "mine" and things that are "shared". So, when I got out the Christmas ornaments, I first arranged them into the section that was ours from gifts last Christmas, and the section that was mine (which has always been mine, even separately from my family's ornaments...they have a special red box to live in). Then, I realized that is our first Christmas as married people, and that our ornaments shouldn't be separate anymore. So I very deliberately mixed the two sections together and put away my little red box, empty.

I put up my icicle decorations over our big living room window, and I put the Charlie Brown Christmas CD in the stereo. Aaron bought lots of tealights. Candles are an essential part of Christmas!

Aaron and I have also bought chocolate to put in our advent calendar. There are a few mini-Lindt balls, but mostly there are chocolate squares from all over the world that we got at a fancy chocolate shop. We haven't bought chocolate for the last 4 days yet, because we want to buy fancy kinds that do better if eaten within 10 days, so we'll buy those later. I guess this advent calendar, shaped like a tree, is going to be our replacement for a real Christmas tree. We're not getting one since we're going to Toronto for a whole week before Christmas and so that messes with the time we would have to enjoy it properly.

In other news, I saw a bus being towed by a giant towtruck today.