Okay.. what the actual heck?… I hear you all muttering. This could have been on the saving Christmas series of posts, but bear with me.
First of all, to clear things up, why did I have one fancy, flame and metallic-red, super long fingernail?
Because Mollie, our younger daughter, shown on the left above, got an awesome nail doing set for late Christmas.
Her sister Jessica got the glitter treatment.
Not bad for beginners.
Mollie, seen here holding hands with her boyfriend, went for the more subdued stars.
I wanted to join in, and as an artist, I wanted the perfect way to wave goodbye to four years of rubish.
I went with the deep-red metallic background and the ever classy flames, on a long pointy nail so tRump wouldn’t miss my salute.
The thing is… hey, thing, where you been?… I am secure in my masculinity, and now I am secure in my democracy. So I kept it on for a few hours until it caught on something and came off.
We managed to pull off our traditional Christmas dinner, after all the quarantining and testing and what not. Did I mention that I drove my mother-in-law’s RV to the Bay Area in a convoy with my wife, younger daughter and her boyfriend, just so we didn’t have to use pubic restrooms?
All just to keep my 97-year-old mother safe. There she is waiting for us to get the dinner served.
My brother Sid, carving the roast beef.
Yorkshire pudding… did I mention that we have a traditional English Christmas dinner every year?
We even have the English Christmas poppers… Google them.
And we did the Christmas Eve matching jammies thing. Mollie and Ben looked adorable as usual.
And so did Jessica and her husband, Jason.
I was going for moving family photos, to save on the cloud for posterity.
Then it got goofy.
There was photo bombing…
But it was fun, even without the other brothers and their families. Sometimes we have around 15 people in the house for almost a week, not to mention guests for fancy dinners and people who stop by to see us. Covid toned that down.
Mom is still waiting for that dinner.
Jason got a little tippsy.
I tried to look nice for late-Christmas dinner, but I do not shave on my vacations!
My mom loves having family around, and that happens less often now.
She finally gave up and began toasting herself.
At the end of the meal comes the Plum Pudding, doused in liquor, and set ablaze. You can’t take a good photo because it is dark, and the shutter wants to stay open and the flash ruins everything anyway.
Jason, wearing the crown from his popper… seriously, Google them.
And Mollie’s boyfriend Ben, the new kid on the block, was fitting in well as always.
Because we had a late Christmas, we decided we should have a late New Years also. It was all planned by my older daughter Jessica. We did it during the inauguration.
It was more fun that you might think. My mom was drinking champagne at 9 in the morning.
My daughter Mollie, seeing the first woman being sworn in as vice president.
And her boyfriend Ben is fitting in to the family quite well.
Seriously, they are too cute together.
This is history, people, and there will be more posts in this series.
Now and again I am struck by how the simplest truths are often the most profound. Take light and shadow as an example.
In this series, I am going to share a lot of rather mundane photos, taken around the neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay Area where I grew up, and in the garden where I played as a child.
Simple images that show the interplay of light and shadow.
I am going to try to use images that do not have one central focal point, no interesting object that draws the eye.
Just the shapes of nature, with no frills.
The real focus of these is the light and shadow… the intermingling of sun and shade.
Because it dawned on me… no pun intended… that however much our eyes rely on light, the shade is just as important. No, it isn’t as flashy as sun on a leaf or flower.
It doesn’t draw the eye like a splash of color.
But it is what gives depth to our view. It is what makes the colors and the highlights pop.
We finally had our Christmas yesterday! Thanks, covid. But I would like to fill you in on what I did to try to save a part of Christmas for my wife, back when the rest of you were having your Christmas. Above, you see part of my ’12 days of Christmas plan” to cheer up my wife when she was at home, I was working, and out daughters were in other states. I had the kids, and the husband and the boyfriend, take photos of themselves in front of the Christmas trees they were near.
I don’t know if you can see them in there, but the original idea was to print the photos, and then curl them up, and shove them inside a little lantern box thing I bought. It has a little batterie operated candle in it. I thought she could look at the kids while she worked. But I then printed them and mounted them on wood, with a nice varnish over them.
So that was another day of gifts.
I also cut a rose out of a skirt that I had made back in my custom t-shirt designing days. I mounted it on some white wood, and added blue and silver glitter before adding the varnish. I call it a snow rose.
Now that is my favorite, in a way. I took a small wooden heart, and used glitter and a gold paint pen to put all our initials on it… wow, you are probably saying… but wait.
I used a Dremel tool to carefully grind down the back until it was thin. A nerve-wracking bit of work, because I couldn’t poke through. Then I filled the hollow with pink paint.
So when you hang it on the tree in front of a light, or in a sunny window, a secret love heart shows through.
But that is as far as I got on the 12 days. I was working, and packing. But now we are all in the Bay Area.
And Mollie and her boyfriend Ben are so in love that it is almost annoying.
Well, I am back in the San Francisco Bay Area again, and there is a long story behind this trip.
But the main point of this adventure is to save Christmas for my family. We haven’t had Christmas yet. Our daughters were in other states, and I was working on Christmas Eve, and New Years Eve. My wife was sitting alone at home.
But now we are all at my 97-year-old mom’s house, the house where I grew up, the house where we always gather for Christmas. So there will be pictures of flowers… with my fake, spray-on dew from a mister bottle…
And there will be pictures of birds…
And there will be pictures of other things, although we are really pretty much in quarantine lockdown. In fact, we all stayed locked down for two weeks before getting tested and cleared before we all set off for the Bay Area. This is a major operation.
We took a walk around the neighborhood, where I took these pictures of Christmas lights with the telephoto lens. I thought the way the lights vanish in the distance would represent this holiday season in a way.
Mollie brought her boyfriend, Ben, on his first visit to the Bay Area. He is from New Mexico, where he and Mollie spent the actual Christmas week.
So it is a little different, but we will try to make this late Christmas as much like a regular Christmas as we can.
Pouring My Art Out by Arthur H. Browne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Based on a work at https://pouringmyartout.wordpress.com/. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Pouring My Art Out 