Cut amaryllis flowers from the grocery store and nice orange berries from the ugly euonymus in the front yard.
I like orange and pink at Christmas.
The amaryllis started out long-stemmed — although not so long as these — but I cut them down as they started to fade a little after a week.
To see what other bloggers have put in a vase today, please visit Cathy at Rambling in the Garden.
Amaryllis, Alberta, Canada, ca. 1930, hand-colored glass lantern slide by William Copeland McCalla, via Provincial Archives of Alberta Commons on flickr (all images here).
The photographer, William McCalla, was interested in botany and photography from an early age. He studied at Cornell University in the early 1890s and later worked in western Canada as a farmer, librarian, and Natural History teacher. While teaching from 1925 to 1938, he made over 1,000 lantern slides of plants and animals as visual aids.
The slides were donated to the Archives by his son and granddaughter in 1982 and 2007.
Almost every German city and town puts on an elaborate Christmas market during the Advent season.
The Stuttgart market — held since at least 1692 — is an excellent one. It made The Telegraph’s top 10 list this year.
As I walked around it on Thursday, taking these snapshots with my phone, I wished that I could also capture its wonderful smells: bread and pastry, sausage, and hot spiced wine (Glühwein).
Click on any thumbnail below to scroll through all my (larger) photos and captions.
enclos*ure 