Not that there's actually that much Christmas that goes on in my small apartment, we usually reserve the large scale Christmas decorating for Ma's place, and last year I had so much other stuff around the place I didn't even bother digging out any of my Christmas bits and pieces.
But given that we deferred the annual Christmas tree trimming extravaganza this year until this coming weekend because we had far too much stuff to do last weekend, it felt good to actually do some Christmas-ing around the place.
Initially I was just going to put up the small pink tinsel tree I bought from Borders several years ago (and which has previously taken pride of place on my desk at work)... but once I did that I realised that it needed more than just the tree in that spot, so I ended up dragging the three boxes of assorted toy soldier paraphernalia out from under my bed and going through that to find one of the big toy soldiers I got (I think) from eBay.
And that turned into a number of other toy soldiers and some reindeers making their way out of storage and I made use of the ornament hanger I bought from Ikea a few weeks back, which actually works quite nicely... it's perhaps not as striking as the wooden rod I used to hang them all from, but it serves it's function.
Before I got down to the Christmas-ing on Monday I'd taken an early trip into the city to pick up our Fringe tickets (woo!), although as a brief aside, I love when the people in the Fringe booth get a look at the number of tickets I'm purchasing and they always seem amazed. Maybe the other people who buy many many tickets either don't buy them this early or else they have them posted out, I don't know. Anyway, where was I... oh yeah... after picking up the tickets I took a side trip Arndale and found one of those little artist's easels for my Sydney Opera House painting.
That's actually what sparked off the whole Christmas thing, as I needed to find another home for that painting before I could put the Christmas tree up... so it all worked out nicely.
And I also found the colour changing LED Christmas tree that also used to sit on my desk at work, so I've plugged that into the laptop and it sits there looking pretty and whatnot.
While I'm not missing a large number of things from the Christmas boxes, I do kind of wish I had a spot for both the little neon Christmas tree as well as the acrylic reindeer with the bell laden antlers. Next year I may have to look into putting more of my normal tchotchkes away (I literally only did that with five things this year) and working something out. But given the fact that I only everything in it's current spot on the bookcases less than two months ago I really didn't want to hide anything away.
Oh, and speaking of Christmas, one of my annual Christmas traditions is online... the PNC Christmas Price Index. It's a really cute index of the cost of the items in the song, The 12 Days of Christmas, which they've been doing for the last 30 years, in more and more involved ways over the last few years.
And for the record, this year the gifts in question would set you back $27,393.17, up 7.7% from last year.
I don't think I've mentioned it already, but in the last few weeks a tribe of rainbow lorikeets have taken up residence in the gum tree right outside my front door... but only first thing in the morning (and by first thing I mean from pre-dawn until about 10am) and then they return again mid-way through the afternoon. Holy crap they make some noise.
The only reason I mention it is that they are currently being intensely noisy. And weirdly it doesn't bug me that much... most of the time it's just general background bird noise, I think I only pay attention when they get really stroppy, more so when the front door is open.
Plus they're gorgeous.
This afternoon I took a wander into the city as the Adelaide College of the Arts in Light Square was throwing an Arts Bazaar. Why they were throwing it on a Friday afternoon instead of on a Saturday, I have no fucking idea, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to head down and check it out. And I figured I may as well walk down rather than trying to find a park somewhere.
All in all... while it wasn't a wasted afternoon, I came away with exactly nothing. I was hoping for some more interesting things than I've seen in various other markets, but about half of the stuff were people who were at Bowerbird, and the rest just didn't grab me.
I did kind of fall in love with a handmade "art doll"... a tattooed strongman with handpainted tattoos and a big handlebar moustache but he cost more than I really wanted to spend. And the only other thing I might have thought about buying didn't have any prices on (seriously, rule one of markets, don't make the customer ask about prices) so in the end I just had a wander around, looked at things and called it a day.
To be honest I was kind of hoping for more stalls by art students selling their original pieces. That I could have gotten into... and while there were a couple, nothing really caught my attention.
On the way back I stopped off briefly at The Jam Factory just for a little bit of a poke around.
To be honest for the last week or so I've kind of had the idea of buying a nice cup and saucer for myself. Granted I really don't drink that much tea, but it's one of those momentary obsessions. Part of me is thinking that it may be worth hitting up some of the op shops and seeing what they have, or possibly the T2 Tea store on Rundle Street since they have a number of really nice sets on their website.
There's not really any rush on that though... it's just going to be one of those things that floats around in the back of my brain for a while I think.
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