Merry Christmas! Remember our tree? I wanted to make more this year at as gifts but couldn’t wrap my head around how to transport them. Perhaps a very long tube?

As planned, we journeyed to Bide-A-Wee Thursday morning for Thanksgiving. The turkey was the best we’d ever tasted, white and dark meat included.

We met Brett’s grouse, of the Grilled Grouse at Bide-A-Wee. It was very soft and its neck still moved.

Some of my favorite pictures from the day were of Brett and Mary’s wirehaired Griffins Annabel and Lily.

I am always trying to get Lily’s picture at Bide-A-Wee, but she has a knack for looking away at the precise moment the shutter clicks. This time I tricked her:

Above, the tablescape after dessert on paper plates licked clean (Dinner was had on the loveliest of plates by Theresa.). Days later, the afterglow remains:

af·ter·glow

• Light or radiance remaining in the sky after the sun has set.
• Good feelings remaining after a pleasurable or successful experience.

There won’t be any dishes to do or wishbones to save at casa Martha & Tom this year. We are headed to Brett & Mary’s, who joined us here last year, for a Bide-a-Wee Thanksgiving. Tom made his pâté, for the third year running, and I made a pumpkin pie.

We wish you a wonderful day with family, friends, and forkfuls of Thanksgiving flavors. Love from Minneapolis,

M&T

I put away our Christmas ornaments today and disassembled the tree; I packed up the lights around the window, the “candles” in the dining room, and the gingerbread tea light holders. Because we’re not quite finished burning through this year’s Frasier Fir candles, I’ll keep our new Sagaform votive holders out a little longer. The spot where the tree was looks awfully bare now, but it’s nice to get things put away and to look forward to next year.

I pack all of our mostly-flat ornaments in an old chocolate box in layers of tissue; the more dimensional ones are stowed in a larger box cushioned with crinkle-cut paper. For added protection, any ceramic or glass pieces are clad in bubble wrap. As if that wasn’t enough, a very few of the ornaments (not pictured) spend the better part of the year obsessive-compulsively stored in their original boxes for maximum security.

All these smaller boxes fit into two plastic totes with locking lids to protect against the periodic flooding our storage space is prone to—the cause of which has thus far not been discovered.

And so, comfortably enough past Epiphany, we close up the boxes of Christmas until next year.

Today is Epiphany, the day the Three Kings reach the manger, or pesebre, to present their gifts to Jesus.

I’m not sure to what extent Epiphany is celebrated in the United States* beyond special readings for Catholic masses near the date, but it’s always had significance for my family in that it marks the end of the Christmas holiday. Backing up a bit, I’ll explain how we begin Christmas. It’s a tradition of my family’s to celebrate the coming of Christmas each year by saying a series of prayers, a Novena, in Spanish over the nine days that precede the holiday. Part of this tradition is to gather together each evening around the pesebre (at my parents’ it is literally a miniature town meant to represent all of Bethlehem constructed on a hill of Spanish moss and elaborately decorated), pray and sing traditional villancicos accompanied by a band of toy percussion instruments. Tom and I have carried on this practice because we enjoy the songs, have fun making “music,” and love the old-Spanish poetry of the prayers themselves. I found our pesebre at Steeple People, our neighborhood thrift store, a couple of years ago, and this year for Christmas I gave my older sister Marcela a pesebre of her own that I came across at a local estate sale.

Given all of that, decorations—including the pesebre—must be up by December 16 in time for the beginning of La Novena. And, Christmas decorations aren’t taken down until after Epiphany. Growing up, I was always horrified by cast-off trees already at the side of the road for garbage collection on December 26, just one day after Christmas. As as adult though, I have found it challenging to keep the tree through January 6, what with it dropping needles everywhere and becoming something of a fire hazard. Fortunately this year that hasn’t been a problem!

Before the decorations come down, though, the Three Kings, who’ve been traveling across the living room to reach the manger since mid-December, arrive to greet the Holy Family.

Happy Epiphany and feliz día de los reyes magos to all!

*Internationally, Epiphany is often the day families exchange gifts, rather than on Christmas itself.