It's getting warmer as Christmas approaches.

Does that sound odd to you? Thirteen years here, and it still sounds odd to me. But the world is round, and tipped on its axis, and so there are fresh mangoes for Christmas (yay!) and real Christmas trees are very hard to find and quite expensive (boo!).

My grandparents collected Currier & Ives prints. Not sure why, because even the most gushing admirers of the oeuvre would be hard-pressed to call these prints high art. And yet there was a certain evocativeness about some of them. This one, for example:


Far be it from me to idealize snowy winters in the country — I spent too many hours trudging with stingingly cold toes through the snow (boots notwithstanding) to do that. But there is a certain sere beauty the mountains acquire when the leaves have fallen; and a winter sunset can glow through the cirrus like gauze-wrapped brass. This print does a pretty good job of capturing such an afternoon.

Miss it?

Oh, yes.