December, Snow, Holidays...and door moldings

Well, we had our big annual Book Paper Scissors event last Saturday. This is a big book arts fair, hosted by the Free Library, and in the past it was a big success. This year however, it was a toss-up... between the weather and the economy - I'm not sure who won. Suffice it to say, I didn't do as well as I have in the last two years. Now granted it was raining pretty steadily most of the morning - and then it turned into snow in the afternoon. It must have snowed for a good five hours. Big beautiful snow flakes, but sadly, none of it stuck. It sure was fun watching the big giant snow flakes falling outside the huge windows of the library. I love the snow.
It put me in the mood for the holidays and I have finally dragged out decorations and am slowly attempting to get them up. And The Inspector was in full swing, making sure I had not forgotten anything in the boxes, and making sure things got put up correctly:
I bought this beautiful little door decoration at Ten Thousand Villages:
It's one of my favorite shops - the best place to buy gifts for everyone/anyone. However - this beautiful door decoration looks terrible without the molding:
The molding has been missing since Jeff put the door in, back in January. I've just been stalling. I don't know why. But now that decorations need to go up - things need to LOOK better than this:
So I got one side finished. Started sawing for the other side and got distracted by wanting to finish putting up Christmas decorations.

Philadelphia has been hosting a Christmas Market a la Christkindle Markt which is basically the German equivalent. It's really sweet - hosted at City Hall with lots of cool stuff to buy. I really hope it picks up. It has a lot of great German cookies and stuff for the holidays along with lots of great crafts and some German Christmas Decoration Vendors, which is nice. So yesterday I splurged and bought a 30ft. pine garland, (it was cheap) and my house smells so good! I wanted to hang it under the arch and book shelves and hang a ton of little glass balls from it. I guess I'll have to finish the outside molding tomorrow night.
While I was waiting for the images for this blog post to load, I knitted a bit more on my newest hat:
I'm pretty excited about it. It's 50% Peruvian wool, and 50% plant fiber from the same region. It's really soft and shiny. I just also hope its warm.
And in other news:
James McBride, author of The Color of Water, came to HSP last week to do research for his newest book... and I got to meet him! He is so nice. What a great guy. I asked our President to bring him up to the conservation lab if he was interested and she did. We got to show off the work we are doing and go to talk with him. After he left I sat down at the computer and got to brag about meeting him to a bunch of people, including my cousin who introduced me to him! She wrote back and said her students were reading his book at that moment! How crazy is that.
WELL, to bring the story to full circle, not only did he take a membership for more research, he sent us two cheese cakes for all our help last week. We had cheesecake sent by James McBride! How cool is that!? I'm sitting here giggling about it. What a great guy.