Thursday 5th January - which day is 12th night?

 No, don't answer that. There are two many choices. When are you celebrating Christmas? When do you start counting from?

I KNOW that Epiphany is tomorrow; and lookee lookee - here are the Three Wise Men stitched impossibly tiny on 16-count Aida. Just typing those words makes my eyes water.

  

You can see my sensible-count-Aida nearby. This is Ang's December contribution to the postcard project. I just have about half an hour's stitching before I need to iron the material to remove the frixion pen, and then I can post it.

The Three Wise Men stitchery is barely one and a half inches each way. There's a bit of gold thread involved in the star. Ang said she had a bit of a frazzling time sewing the picture to the cloth, but to my mind it makes the stable look really rustic.

I'm so pleased with the picture. The images of 'Star' and 'Light' are what I will be considering this year so the picture is Just Perfect. 

Our Christmas decorations are all taken down and carried upstairs except a string of lights that will stay in the window until Candlemas (2nd February) and a few decorations that we discovered after everything else had been packed. Isn't that always the way?

What is unbelievable is that this is the sum total of all our decorations now;

The tree in its box at the front, a sainsbury shopping bag of tinsel with the tree skirt dropped on top, and all the other decorations and lights boxed and bagged and zipped into those two green bags. After forty years of random unsorted bits and pieces, we did a clear out (including three Christmas trees, remember?). Now that we have a small tree we didn't need anything like the number of decorations, so we have given them away, some with the trees, some to charity shops.

What a relief, and it only took an afternoon to reach this point.

(Word to the Wise; store Advent decorations and calendars, and spare Christmas Cards somewhere more accessible than the deep dark recesses of the loft.)