Christmas Decorations

Published on 19 December 2005 in , , ,

If you’re not reading this in a newsreader then you may notice that the Christmas lights have gone up here at Bods’s Blog. I finally decided that I felt festive enough to put a little bit of reddish pixie dust on the old site, although it was a close run thing.

It’s taken me a long time to get close to being festive, but suffering the Christmas shopping last weekend really did tip the balance. (Congratulations incidentally to Argos in Wimbledon for winning the award of “Most Gormless Staff”).

Of course last weekend, the road between Marble Arch and Oxford Circus was shut, which meant I could stand in the middle of Oxford Street and do a merry, festive jig, which was great fun until I realised just how many people were out in force. The entire of Oxford Street – two lanes, two pavements – just full of people. It was quite frankly scary. Still, at least we weren’t all crowded into a third of the space.

Still shopping is out of the way, the Christmas tree is up, I’ve had a few mince pies and of course, redecorated the blog. In case you’re wondering, the three things in the picture are three items from a rather fantastic set of Christmas Russian dolls that my sister gave me a few years ago.

The biggest one is Father Frost, or Father Christmas to you or I. Inside him is Mother Christmas. Then inside her is a snowman with a hat and round glasses. And inside him (and not pictured as it’s too small) is a little Christmas tree!

They look fantastic, and go well with the Russian christmas tree decorations from the year before (three Father Frosts – one in blue for some reason) and two others based on those curvey roofs you get on Russian churches.

If you’re wondering about the rather saturated effect on the photo by the way, it’s because in the original shot, the snowman was very bright as he caught the flash. So I started messing with the levels on the image and by accident, made it all white and ghostly. It looked rather cool, so got kept.

The image is a bit taller than I’d prefer for these blog pages, and I also had to settle for a fixed width of the page – I just couldn’t find an image which would work with the normal stretchy page layout, and look good on the page. Much as I’m not a fan of fixing a page width rather than having it adapt to the size that you the user, are viewing the page at, I decided to abandon my principles for the sake of something that looked nice. It’s only for a few weeks after all. I hope you’ll forgive my festive sacrifices as I throw my morals out of the window for a few weeks, but do rest assured… Normal service will be resumed in the New Year. And I’ll try to be extra miserable and depressed to make up for it.