In the Spirit of the Season

I went to the storage unit (in our high rise parking garage) yesterday and pulled out a few more Christmas-themed, bendable, posable (collectible) figures. So they keep popping up around the apartment. They make me smile when I look at them. 

The bar area (we have a little glass cabinet in the living room where we store glassware and such and a few bottles of this and that mostly just for display) keeps getting more Christmas cheer.

This area holds our tiny tree with tiny silly critters plus some lego Christmas things and some cards I saved from prior years because I really liked them.

A few holiday cards have come our way, too, and they are scattered around on display. Some are on the screen (which is in a corner by the front door so that you don't just see a stool, vacuum cleaner, ladder and luggage rack that we often store in that area). A couple of bendable Santas are holding up the stockings. FFP's is from the fifties made by his mom and mine is from the seventies before I moved to Austin, made by my mom or maybe my sister. Other cards are on the phone nook just to the left.

All this stuff cheers me up somehow when I see it. I spend a lot of time in our condo some days. Yesterday, I went out to play tennis and then ran a couple of errands (camera store to pick up slides I had digitized and thrift store to dump a few things). I spent the rest of the day in the apartment. I cleaned, I did some things on the computer, I read, we binged some of "The Crown." Yeah, so if you are going to be cooped up in a space, it might as well be whimsical. Sometimes when I'm dusting I take 'shelfies' of the many bookshelves in this place with the whimsical artifacts and books.

Whimsy is always good, I think. I took a moment to look around yesterday after I dropped stuff off at my favorite thrift store. (Top Drawer in Austin, benefiting Project Transitions which provides housing and services for people living with HIV/AIDS.) They'd apparently received a donation of some masks. They used this one to dress a mannequin.

 It made me laugh. Especially because one of the slides I got from my aunt and had digitized is this one:

Yeah, when I fished it out from all the sunsets, beaches, lava flows, lighthouses and pictures of my aunt and her friends and relatives, it was simply labeled 'Alfred Hitchcock, Oahu.' I thought, "What, the heck?" and called FFP over to look through the loupe at it on the light table. Life is interesting, isn't it? Just pay attention.