Christmas Chaos

 Christmas 2008. The year we were moving house.

I was too dizzy to have a proper Christmas tree. See that palmera with balls behind?

The last three weeks has been a blur, with all the Christmas preparations going on (hence the lack of posts)  Christmas in Manila takes on a different level--it's a mixture of excitement, mayhem, stress, and warm fuzzy feelings.  Just last night I got together with yet another group of friends. People I don't see throughout the year, but on Christmas, when everybody is home for the holidays, we make a special effort to have a Christmas meal together. Then we always wonder why we don't see each other more often.

Faith and G's Dollhouse

 Faith Bradford started her collection when she was 7 years old, 

and donated it to the Smithsonian in 1951

I've always had a fascination for dollhouses ever since I saw the Faith Bradford dollhouse at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC more than ten years ago.  The history of this dollhouse is so intriguing that there is even a book dedicated to the details of the dollhouse.

Last year, when G mentioned that she wanted a dollhouse for her birthday, I immediately asked the carpenter, who happened to be building shelves in our (real) house, to work on a dollhouse for her instead.

Brown Paper Packages Wrapped up in String...

These are a few of my favorite things!

I'm was very excited with what arrived in the mail yesterday.  Okay, it wasn't really "mail" as in the postman from the Philippine post office. It was the delivery person of my door-to-door balikbayan service from San Francisco who delivered this package. When I order things from Amazon and other websites, I have it delivered straight to Bayanihan Cargo in San Francisco and they just throw it into the next container that's leaving. I get it about three weeks later, delivered directly to my kitchen table, freight collect. Now that's what I call service deluxe!