Welcome back to the Virtual Advent Tour!

Today the tour heads back to Compassionknit for Day 17.

We’ll see you back here tomorrow!

Today is the 16th day of the Virtual Advent Tour — we’re down to single digits until the big day!

Our tour returns to Jo Kay at Beyond Strange New Words today, who has a post for us about Santa’s Train.

See you tomorrow!

Welcome back to the Virtual Advent Tour!

Before I send you off today I wanted to acknowledge that today is Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday in Advent. Here is “Gaudete” from Erasure, which might be a little more synth-heavy than you’re used to:

Behind Door #15 we have a post from Constance at Staircase Wit, who shares a game that her family plays with their Christmas gifts.

See you back here tomorrow!

Earlier this month, I gave you recommendations for holiday movies from the 20th century that I like. Today, I’ll share ten from the first two decades of this century.

They are in no particular order.

1. The Holiday (2006): Two women, one in L.A. and one in an English village and both reeling from heartbreak, trade homes at Christmas and find what they need most.
2. Love Actually (2003): A series of interconnected London romances coalesce through the holiday season, culminating on Christmas Eve.
3. The Polar Express (2004): A boy, teetering on the edge of no longer believing in Santa Claus, takes a train to the North Pole, ultimately discovering faith in the unseen, yet still known.
4. Elf (2003): A man, raised by an elf in the North Pole, moves to New York City, in search of a relationship with his birth father, a high-powered ad executive. This is Will Ferrell at his funniest.
5. The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017): A fictionalized version of Charles Dickens, teetering on the edge of personal and fiscal crisis, is haunted by the ghosts of the characters who will come together to form the cast of A Christmas Carol.
6. Arthur Christmas (2011): In this animated tale, Santa’s bumbling, but well-intentioned younger son, must fix a misdelivery in time to save Christmas for a little girl while overcoming a series of misadventures involving reindeer and his grandfather.
7. The Santa Clause 2 (2008): In the second of the Santa Clause trilogy, Santa discovers there’s a second clause and that he must find a wife or forfeit the job.
8. A Christmas Prince (2017): In this Netflix film, a journalist goes undercover in a fictional European nation as a governess to get the scoop on the heir to the throne, but she discovers a much more personally interesting story. (There are two sequels, the newest of which I haven’t yet seen, that continue the saga.)
9. The Man Who Saved Christmas (2002): Based on a true story, a Connecticut toymaker, whose factory is requisitioned during WWI petitions the government to let him resume making toys to bring joy to the nation’s children during wartime.
10. The Christmas Chronicles (2018): In this Netflix film, two siblings’ attempt to photograph Santa on Christmas Eve go off the rails, taking them on an adventure that results in Santa’s imprisonment and one of the most joyful jail-cell jams in cinematic history.

Are there any Christmas movies from the past 20 years that you particularly love?

Welcome back to the Virtual Advent Tour! You’re back with me for the next couple of days.

Today is Friday the 13th, and I briefly thought about looking up things that people consider superstitious about Christmas to tie in with the date. After all, superstitions are a form of odd tradition, and this holiday in particular is steeped in customs. But then I decided that I’m not especially superstitious about Christmas (although I might consider it bad luck indeed if my holiday season didn’t include certain things), so I forewent the topic. But I did think it was interesting to consider for a few minutes. Do you have Christmas-related superstitions?

Instead, I’m taking you on another photo tour, this time of the Macy’s windows. I love taking pictures of the ones here in D.C. every year, but since the week before Thanksgiving found me in the Big Apple just after the big unveiling, I decided to head to the flagship store — the inspiration for Miracle on 34th Street — and give you a tour of their windows.

These are not the best shots I’ve ever taken, so apologies for that. But I do think they give you a flavor of this year’s display.

This year’s theme centers around a little girl who wants to be Santa Claus.

The windows in New York offered a lot of opportunity for interaction, which I assume would be hard to pull off at their other locations. But the features were very popular with tourists, who could make Willow the dog scratch its nose or collect gifts in a video game-like environment.

My photos don’t accurately depict the motion of the windows, but I hope they give you a sense of their whimsy.

I’d hoped to push this post off until I had a chance to get over to the Holidays on Display exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, but as we’re halfway through the month, I’m a little worried I won’t get to the museum until it’s too late to share with you here.

See you back here tomorrow!

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Rudi, Sarah, and I went out for pizza at our favorite D.C. pizza joint last Saturday. The owner of the shop has publicly shared he’s considering moving to Colorado, and none of the shop’s social media pages have been updated in more than six months, so if they suddenly decide to close up shop in the middle of the night, at least we all enjoyed one last pie from them.

2. Rudi helped me finish decorating the Christmas tree the night before he left for Salt Lake City. This tree, which I bought for $20 in Connecticut, had a lot of bare patches in the middle, which might have been a turn-off for some people. It was very obvious when there was nothing on the tree but lights and would have remained so if I’d had a paucity of decorations. But empty space lends itself to dangly ornaments, and the tree has a lot of strong branches to hang heavier ones from, so now you’d be hard-pressed to notice the gaps.

3. Various people on my volleyball team have played together since last spring (four of us from one team, and three from another), but this is the first time the entire team has said they’d like to play together again in the next season. I keep getting emails from them as they sign up for the winter league. I’ve liked various teams I’ve played with before, but this group of folks is the first one that I’ve considered friends.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?