Christmas Eve Dinner

Set for Christmas Dinner
Originally uploaded by hjdong

A bit late for this post perhaps. I did just sit down to write this, well, 4 hours ago, add to it that Darren changed my entire photo system so I would have a super fancy back up system (which I desperately needed) and a new cataloging system (according to him, I desperately needed it) and now I have no idea how to get my pictures on-line in a timely manner. I was going to resize multiple pictures and put them in through blogger, but I am exhausted. So, this may be a short post or I may post about multiple topics and you can look at the pictures in flickr. We'll see how long I last.

Anyway, as well as you can see in the picture, I am finally debuting most of my gifts from my sister for my birthday/Christmas: my grandmother's china and silverware. We used it for Christmas Eve (nothing broke) for the first time. As you can imagine, it is quite a sentimental gift. My grandmother ate off of them everyday, put them in the dishwasher, treated them, as, well, dishes. While I don't intend to be quite so casual, I do intend to use them fairly regularly, because that is how fond memories of them are made.

Everything on the table (with the exception of 3 glass votives I picked up after Christmas on clearance last year) has meaning to me in fact. Crystal wine glasses from a friend who got them during a semester abroad in college, clay water goblets I got during a field study in Montana, a wooden bowl from a trip to Alaska with salad tongs that were a wedding gift, Jamie picked flowers "all day" and then "arranged" them in his sand bucket, flowers Darren got for our anniversary, a snowman made from Jamie's footprint, two nutcrackers, one bought each time Jamie has seen it, a snowman cookie jar given to me by a good friend, and a candle and beaded ring given to me by Chelle, before we were even friends.

A table set with love.

And you'll have to wait for more.