Neighbourhood lights

As our snow lay on the ground indecisively while the heavens alternately rained and snowed (and sometimes sleeted, or freezing-rained), this snowman kept hanging around (suspended from a tree) in front of a North Toronto house.

Happy new year!

Lights! Camera! No lights!

But pictures of lights!

Alas... The Trail of Lights at Downsview Park is not happening this year, due to construction at the site. So here are some pictures shot from the car last year (when, as you can see, it had been a bit rainy).

Murray Christmas!

“ ‘I think the Christmas card was one of my best inventions,’ [the Devil] said. ‘Yes, I think the Christmas card has done as much to put Christmas to the bad as any other single thing. And I began it so cleverly; just a few pretty Victorian printed greetings, and then – well, you know what it is today.”

Robertson Davies
When Satan Goes Home for Christmas

House guests

My sister is visiting. She is not in this picture.
The dog—Landon, the Sheltie—is visiting too. That's him in the picture. Euripides, my Siamese, is enjoying his company. As much as a cat can enjoy the company of a dog, but Rippy seems glad of having a male pal.

Murray Christmas!

A musician hanging out in our Christmas tree.
More later — Santa came and we're checking out what's under the tree.
In the meantime, Murray Christmas (an old family joke) to you all!

Believe

Again, I did NOT PhotoShop the red nose into this picture. I shot this outside Tucson, Ariz. I saw two of these signs - the other was on the other side of the highway.
I shit you not.
If you don't believe me, Rudolph will bypass your house completely and you won't even get a lump of coal!

Christmasy but creepy?

This fellow and five of his brothers appear on the now-closed Village Theatre in Chicago. This whole figure—especially his tangle of musical instruments—has always struck me as Christmasy. I think he reminds me (without the instruments) of Marley after he's removed the bandage that keeps his jaws shut.
But he's sort of creepy too, which detracts a bit from his Christmasy aspects.

Blue Christmas

The City of Toronto decks out many of its neighbourhoods and squares with large light displays every year. The city also offers bus tours — one of the east end and one of the west end — to view the "cavalcade of lights." It's a hop-on/hop-off arrangement, to encourage riders to hop and shop.
This blue tree is in Dundas Square and part of the light display near the Eaton Centre.

Me, I'm not so crazy about the background of Dundas Square, so I (admittedly crudely) PhotoShopped most of it out.
As messy and noisy and commercial as the background of Dundas Square is here, if I'd shot the blue tree from the other side, the tree would be overwhelmed by a ginormous advertising tower on the opposite corner. I'll try to get a shot from that angle some time this weekend, braving the fierce winter storm that is swirling about us even as I speak.

Time for something seasonal

Doesn't this guy look like the Ghost of Christmas Present in the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol? Only less jolly?
(His current gig is watching over Geary Street from the façade of the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco.)