The Decembers of my childhood were brutally cold. We lived in a converted general store and post office near a railroad in Waterloo, Montana. Our section of the Jefferson river valley was narrow. Bracketed by mountains to the west and east. In the winter, it was a wind tunnel.

Before our furnace was installed (sometime in my middle school era), we warmed our house with the three wood-burning stoves scattered about the house. I remember my mom frantically stoking the fires before we went to bed. No matter; our beds would be frozen against the walls every morning. Winter vacation during the school year was less a vacation and more an exercise in fighting off cabin fever while chopping wood.

As an adult, my relationship with this time of year is much less fraught. The Puget Sound is delightfully temperate. Below freezing temperatures are reserved for the depths of the night, and rare even then. Instead of fighting off the weather, I get to bask in the glory of the Christmas season. The lights, the food (the food!!), the omnipresent sense of tradition and history. It’s a special time of year.

Every year since we’ve moved out to Woodinville we’ve covered our house in incandescent lights that evoke memories of gingerbread houses.

We go to Buttonwood Farm where we hunt for our favorite tree before savagely cutting it down. Our objectification of each tree is brutal (“That one is too fat”, “Look at the gaps in that one. Not worth it.”), but necessary. The size of the tree we get would make my heart swoon if I was a child (it certainly does as an adult).

My mother-in-law gifted us her Santa ornament collection during the last years in our condo on Eastlake Avenue in Seattle. With our gargantuan tree, we can now take full advantage of the silliness provided by each ornament. With the exception of the lights and wood bead garland, the tree is adorned only with Santas in various clothes, locations, and poses.

My favorites are Santa in motion. If you ran into Santa running, how could you not smile and wave back? Who is a better backcountry companion than Santa Claus? I’m not a biker, but Santa on a bike is inspirational.

Santa Snoopy oozes cool. Santa Homer is bright-eyed, full of joy; his best self.

The man loves garlic. Smart. And wrestling? More suspect.

Moraine also loves Santa.

Learned in today’s Hugo session:

• Writing posts in Markdown is nice, but so is making sure my writing is spell-checked! My writing is taking place in Visual Studio Code, so I added a new extension (Code Spell Checker) to make sure I don’t embarrass myself too much.
• The theme I’m using ships with hugo-easy-gallery (repo here) which I’ve used in today’s post, but the project itself is no longer maintained. Might need to revisit this, especially since I can’t seem to get the images to load when clicking on them at the moment.
  • Update: This is “fixed” now, but I’m having to duplicate the image in the /img directory as well as create a nested directory inside the /posts/ directory so that I can make these galleries function. This is just a short-term fix.
• Related, I need to work on how images are rendered on the site. Both so that readers don’t have to load mammoth files for these posts and so the ergonomics are better for content management.