Counting down till Christmas

I called this week's blog counting down till Christmas. Appropriately, I found this great wooden advent calendar in a chocolate shop in town. Yes, every door is filled with a home-made chocolate. It now adorns our little living space. There is a Genevoise legend that I learned about this past week. They celebrate on the 1st of December a festival called Escalade. The story goes that in the early 1600's the city of Geneva was under a surprise attack, and a woman who saw the invaders coming poured her boiling soup over the city wall, thus scalding the encroachers. The noise this made alerted the Genevoise soldiers and they were able to fend off the attack and save the city. So in rememberance they make what looks like old soup kettles out of chocolate and fill them with marzipan shaped and colored vegetables. You can see them everywhere in stores and they come in all sizes from very small to gigantic. Because they don't really celebrate Halloween nor Thanksgiving Christmas decorations go up very early here.

There is no shortage of "festive items" in the stores, especially beautiful displays of Christmas goodies. The first week in December Steve and I will be in Prague for a business conference and I am looking forward to seeing what is there. Getting ready for Christmas is different and really quite fun.

You get the idea of how cold it is by how we are dressed to go to church. Steve hadn't put on his gloves yet. Baby it's cold outside and only going to get colder. The high for the week was about 42 F and it feels much colder with the biz or wind that is always present. I think a hat will be my next purchase.