Winter is here. I don’t really care what the calendar says. It happened yesterday. In the morning the sun was shining and it wasn’t very cold, so I took the pups for a long-ish walk. It was still fall then.

By evening it was winter. Not cold snowy winters like the mid-west or east coast. The dark, wet enough to work the chilliness into your bones of a Puget Sound region winter. No doubt we’ll get a few more flashes of sunshine, but this time of year the sun arrives with a cold north wind.

I love it when Thanksgiving and Christmas are over a month apart. Things are less frantic. I’ve taken down the fall decorations and not put up the Christmas ones. I wait until December.

One benefit to the longer time between holidays is that most holiday special attractions are open this week, but not yet crowded. So today (while my spouse wrestled with the clogged drain in the kitchen… they really should saint that man!)I took myself off to visit the “Gingerbread Village”. I put “Gingerbread Village” in quotes because it’s more than gingerbread and more than a village. It is really sculptures. This year the theme is The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and the entries were imaginative and filled with fun details (to see any image larger click on it).

I called this one “Mount Crumpet”

Amazing details.

The grinch’s lair.

Mount Crumpet

A penguin…who knew?

I called this one “the grinch’s lair”:

This one was Whoville plus Mount Crumpit:

This one was Whoville:

Last, but not least, was “The Feast”:

They have official names somewhere but I was so entranced looking at the details that I didn’t catch them. For more information about the annual Gingerbread Village here is the website: GingerbreadVillage.org.
I wouldn’t say that I am ready for the holiday season to commence, but, after today’s outing I am feeling a good deal less hostile to it.