'Tis the Season

Again during this holiday season many area malls have decorated for Christmas and you hear Christmas themed music everywhere. This mall's theme was Golden Christmas. Everything was golden!

 At another mall the theme was Winter Wonderland I believe:

At the mall across the street from us the theme is Holiday Season and includes an Eiffel Tower and trees spotty with cotton and blue lights making them look like blue trees.

But wait there's more... Last weekend there was a Christmas carol performance by a group of Victorian costumed singers. During the performance, "snow" dropped from a higher floor. You have to look closely to see the "snow." Nice effect but the "snow" didn't seem to make it all the way down. I don't believe it was any sort of snow making machine. It could have been broken up feathers because they floated more than dropped.

About the Christmas trees... They seem to sell every color of tree here: blue, yellow, red, black, white, silver, purple. What ever color you want. In this case, some are also flocked.

And we actually saw a lady decorating a small artificial tree in a store. She was unwrapping ornaments and placing them on the tree she was going to buy. The tree was only 2 feet tall, if that, but she seemed determined to make it perfect.

And then there is this! Probably a show was going to start soon. Quite the interesting cast of characters on the escalator in front of us. One went down the escalator on roller skates. We checked, roller skates didn't seem to be on the forbidden list for the escalators. We also saw a green jester on tall stilts and several jesters on high-tech shorter stilts, 2 on unicycles...and of course Santa!

On the home front here's a pretty picture from one of our two trees in the apartment. These are hand beaded by artists for a local charity. The ball form itself is made from newspaper—probably a lot like paper maché. The beads are not glued on but are created using beading line and beads one row at a time. Each year they do ornaments in what I would call the traditional colors but also an annual theme color. This year's theme color is lavender. I couldn't really see that on my trees but last year they had cobalt blue and white as a theme. Those were pretty. We have purchased quite a few of these, all different in red, white, green, gold.

And here are a couple of photos of our two trees- each without lights turned and with lights on! The wider one is about 5 feet tall. The skinnier tree is 6.5 feet tall and is flocked. I made about 3 dozen ornaments to add to the ones we purchased.