and then there was Christmas

Okay, Christmas. Which was almost a month ago, but never mind. Actually I think we didn't manage to put up the tree until the weekend before, which would have been exactly a month ago. So I am late, but not (too) outrageously so.

I forgot to take pictures of the tree. It was an Ikea tree. (Last year it was a Loblaws tree.) Pd is adamant that we get a real tree, but other than that we're not terribly picky. I think it was a balsam? (I think they all are?) It wasn't very smelly, I'm afraid — then again, I spent almost the entirely of the holidays with a congested nose, so it's possible that my house smelled like the Black Forest and I was merely oblivious.


The Spanish Inquisition helped me decorate the tree. She loves putting things in and out of boxes, so it was perfect. The actual mechanism of hooking the ornament into the tree was a bit beyond her — particularly as I wasn't about to give her any of the ornament hooks — but she totally understood the idea and tried very hard to follow through.


(Here she is trying to balance a wooden ornament on a branch, next to another ornament — which totally makes sense to me. I think next year we're going to have a very bottom-heavy tree, decor-wise.)

The tree was for the Spanish Inquisition. The mantel was for me.

Behold:

Hogwarts Castle, Borgin & Burkes, and Gringotts. There was also Ollivander's, which you can see in the picture at the top of this post.  I was going to add the Hogwarts Express, too, but it turns out that our mantel is a little narrower than I expected. Also, we finished these at the very last minute — literally, at 11 o'clock on Christmas Eve — and I was so tired I forgot about the minifigs — so it turns out that, on Christmas and in the dead of night, only Dementors, a couple of goblins and a few random Weasleys inhabit Diagon Alley. Which I suppose isn't entirely unexpected.

I am really just an average (as opposed to fanatical) Harry Potter fan, and not a particularly skilled LEGO builder (although I do love it); it's just that I happen to like medieval villages, too, so Harry Potter and LEGO and a Christmas village was just too much good to pass up.


And finally, on Boxing Day, we had a big snowstorm — I mean, really, we were buried; it was wonderful. It turns out that there is a great tobogganing hill literally five minutes' walk away from our house, so we gathered some friends and took the Spanish Inquisition for her first sledding run. 


Okay, so honestly, she didn't seem terribly impressed. But the rest of us liked it.