God rest ye merry, gentlemen...

I got home around 4:30 or 5 this afternoon, after spending the weekend in Ohio visiting grauwulf's family, and my mother was in the kitchen painting icing onto the third wave of her intricate christmas cookies. (These are cookie cutter cookies in all kinds of shapes from elephants and hippos to santa's head, and the cat and the fiddle, which then get "painted" in multiple colors of icing, both flat and as piping, with the occasional flower or sprinkle topping as well for eyes or texture. This year the sheep and poodles got bits of mini-marshmallow for fluff, too. There was a day last week when I had to negotiate for stove space to cook lunch, because there were too many cookies spread out all over the kitchen.)

At any rate, it was not until I got home this afternoon that I learned that there was a group of neighbors going caroling tonight, and so we ended up wandering around in the cold with a group of slightly rowdy adults, (I suspect I was still the youngest of the bunch, excepting the french foreign exchange student who came along with his host father, but not by more than five years or so) most of whom I hadn't met before, singing carols. Well, some carols-- they had just added a bunch of more modern christmas songs to their binders which I would have been just as happy to skip, although it was depressing how well I knew most of them. But in any case, they've apparently been doing this for the last five years, and I think it's a pity I've only just now discovered it was going on. I'm told they even came to our house last year, although I wasn't there for it. Chalk another one up for discovering the cool things in a place just before you move... Oh well.