Dickens, in pictures.

 

Mr.Charles Dickens

   

Ebenezer Scrooge


 

Take heed, Mathews children!





A quick run through the story...



..outside the old Masonic building.

 Some

'period characters"



The ghost of Christmas present - and a policeman.



Queen Victoria, Jacob Marley and another ghost



Carols in the bandstand.



Guess who showed up, giving children candy?



A very chilly piper and drummer



Bah! Humbug!











Oh! ChristmasTree!






Take a cart, then....pick your tree





This one?



No. Keep looking!

This is the one. Now....saw it down!

Ta Da!

A bit of help to tidy up, then it's off to the professionals for......

a haircut.....

a hole in the bottom .....

for the stand, then.....

in she goes......

and hey presto, a bound tree ready for home.

They even help you load her up!



And a quick family photo for the album!


Done.



What the Dickens?

'Tis a funny old thing in this part of the world that ne'er a morsel do you hear of Christmas until the day after Thanksgiving then Bam! It's everywhere. And nowhere is this dramatic change more noticeable than in downtown Skaneateles.

For it is here that the local AmDrams like to thesp it up to the max and dash about town dressed as characters from A Christmas Carol. Yes, every weekend from now until Christmas Eve, various Cratchits, ghosts and even old Charlie-boy himself can be seen promenading the streets in full period costume (freezing their extremities off, no doubt) and greeting passers-by in English. And by that I mean English accents. Most of which, it must be said, fall into the Dick Van Dyke 'Cor Blimey Guv'nah' school of regional dialect, aiming hard for Whitechapel but hitting Dublin square on. Shocked they are indeed when answered in the Queen's own RP, and never entirely sure whether one is joining in with the charade or taking the, erm, mickey.

Anyway, the point is that they perform little snippets of the story at forewarned times of the day, and add in little extras like High Tea with Queen Victoria and a Carol-Off in the Bandstand. Much hilarity ensued on the opening day when an Urchin relieved a Gentleman of his fob watch and was chased down the street with a "Stop thief! In fact I felt doubly privileged when the Ghost of Christmas Present wished me Merry Christmas twice within the same hour. On the 26th November, no less.

This is the 17th year that Skaneateles has hosted such an extraordinary event and the tourists love it. This year the opening speeches were accompanied by flurries of aptly timed snow, and it was definitely fun spotting the characters, but the whole thing has the potential to get a little, how shall I say? annoying, with  its  persistent merriment and olde Worlde charm. Yup, I'm with Ebenezer on this one. Bah! Humbug.        

Beautiful baby, fabulous clothes, and our high chair, at last.

Finally

The Big Day dawned bright and sunny and a suitably filling breakfast was ordered to prepare us all for the next American Adventure. The morning was planned down to the last minute and, for once, the whole family was packed and in the car dead on time.
Having arrived (unusually) early, I spent the time psyching myself up. The half hour of pacing and mumbling flew by. It could not be put off any longer and it was with damp palms, a cold sweat, churning stomach and a general all round paling of skin that I prepared myself to.......


...watch Finn take to the ice for the first time.


My heart was in my mouth, I couldn't speak, I nearly left Meg in the foyer.

Finn was fine.

Really excited in fact, as he padded up and proudly pulled on his number 50 jersey. (I didn't see any of this, having been banished from the changing room due to exuding excessive levels of fear - Jodi thought this might put Finn off, for some reason.)

The first I saw was him tottering on unfamiliar blades down the hallway, clutching onto Dad for dear life, then finding himself being unceremoniously propped against a wall while Jodi shared a joke with the other hockey parents. (Obviously some of the other Mums were doing a much better job of keeping themselves under control than I was).

The word was given and the thirty or so teeny tiny, helmeted, padded and skated hockey tots were led one by one onto the ice.

It was instantly clear who had hockey parents, as some of the little girls and boys made a passable effort at skating over to some padded benches placed on the ice and sat down. Then there were those who had never before set foot on the ice and were given personal escorts to support them over to their places. Then there was the small Australian boy who wasn't really sure what ice was and looked more than a little surprised at discovering that it was actually quite cold.

I won't go  into too much detail as we have video, lots and lots of video, but progress was definitely made. The coaches were fabulous and let the kids find out a lot of things on their own but leaped in at speed if it looked as though despondency was setting in. One of them spent five individual minutes with Finn and he re-joined his group smiling - upright and smiling. He had started to move his feet and get up by himself and he was loving it.

Suffice it to say that the little boy who stepped off the ice practically skipped back to the locker room in his skates with not so much as a held hand and didn't stop talking about his hour on the ice all day. If that is not a roaring success then I don't know what is.

What a good girl

A Real Estate Agent came to value our house today. Two of them in fact. And true to their species, having made an appointment for a definite time of the day, they turned up twenty minutes late. Of course, they did.  So, having got me on the back foot before they even arrived and having really upset Meg who was dropping every hint at her disposal that she needed to go to bed NOW, they proceeded to stand about chatting for 10 minutes before actually looking at anything. I chivvied them along with an almost polite "Have you been here before or would you like me to show you around?' and they got on with it. They wandered about, loudly pointing out the improvements that our landlord has made since he bought the place, always on the lookout for a quick sale it would seem. When they'd finished they came back for a bit more chatting and the older of the two said something quite extraordinary. And I quote:

"My, you're a good housekeeper!"

It's a wonder she didn't pat me on the head at the same time to really emphasise her point.

As promised, some photos of the houses in the village. Our current house looks nothing like these.

Just a quick word.....

My little boy has a couple of favourite songs at the moment, 'London Bridge is falling down, My Spare Lady,' and 'In a Cabbage in a wood, little old man at the window stood.'

********

He refused point blank the other day to put his slippers on. "But Mummy I can't - there's scarecrows on them."
"But you have trains on your slippers, son, not scarecrows."
"I can't do it Mummy, the scarecrows are there."
"Show me, poppet, show me where the scarecrows are."
"Look, Mummy," pointing, "Scarecrows."
"Darling, that's there to help you with your slippers, not to get in the way. And just to be clear, it's usually called Velcro!"

********

When being reprimanded by a female family member for not getting on and eating his dinner, his riposte was a little surprising:

"Don't talk to me like that you silly, bl##dy woman!"

********

Where, oh where, does it come from?!

The longest time.....

 I don't know if you've heard, but Halloween round here is a big deal. A really big deal. Such a big deal in fact that folk have been preparing for it since mid-September. That's mid SEPTEMBER and Halloween is, for the uninitiated, at the END OF OCTOBER.

And when I say preparing, I mean decorating houses, purchasing or making costumes, buying "candy", baking - you name it, it's been going on. And the anticipation grows. This all strikes me as slightly odd, and beggars the question: does this very God-fearing country know what Halloween is actually all about?

Anyway, it is not ours to question, just to join in - a little. Acquaintances have responded with genuinely shocked faces when I have answered the question, "Are you taking Finn Trick or Treating?" with a to-the-point,"No." This is probably the only year we will be able to get away with it, so we're going to.

We have, however, done a proper job with the pumpkins. Finn's pre-school organised an outing to the Pumpkin Patch (and by this I mean an actual Pumpkin Patch where pumpkins are grown). It was fun: we wandered about the enormous field looking for the perfect pumpkin, of just the right size and shape, with no rotten bits and as few creepy-crawlies in residence as possible. These were collected and purchased (at $2 a piece) in plenty of time for the children to visit the baby animals, play in the corn, and wander round ogling at all the scary tableaux about the place. I tried to encourage Finn not to spend too much time looking at the ghosts and werewolves and spooky house with empty moving rocking chair and the like. I have one child that wakes crying in the night, I don't need another one!

So, the idea is that you buy the pumpkins to carve or just put outside your house as decoration, along with the ghosts, gravestones, witches etc. This farm dedicates acres and acres of land to pumpkin growing. But the one thing you don't do with these acres and acres of huge pumpkins? Eat them. They are grown for ornamental purposes only. Three applications of pesticides and all.

Several lessons we have learnt from the whole pumpkin episode:

1. Carving pumkpins is fun, the resulting Jack'O'Lantern is very effective (see pictures) especially when enhanced with web and spiders to make it truly scary.

2. Finn is too much of a wuss to put his hand inside a pumpkin and pull out all the seeds and string business - he would use the scoop in our carving kit but not his hands.

3. if you leave a beautiful Jack'O'Lantern in a house which is centrally heated, you will wake up one morning to a collapsed, putrifying mess; 4. always make sure you have a spare in reserve if said disaster occurs before Halloween!

We did attend the Halloween party at Finn's school. The kids all came in costume - we found Finn a Lightening McQueen Pit Crew oufit complete with sponsors hat, ear piece and microphone - some obviously the result of far more parental effort than a quick trip to Walmart - ahem. They ate rubbish for a bit, trick or treated amongst themselves then sang some songs. And that, as far as Finn is concerned is what you do on Halloween. Long may it last.