Memories are made of...

Not sure what you call this in English - the best word I find in the dictionary is probably just "hanging". Or would you say "tapestry" even though it's not woven? Anyway... It was made by my mother, some time back in my childhood. It's a sort of combined collage-quilt-embrodery-technique. I can't actually remember where it used to hang, if it had a special place at all. I happened to find it now on 1st Advent when rummaging through some drawers at dad's house looking for table cloths. Didn't find a good place to put it up there where he would see it anyway so I took it home with me. Handwashed and ironed it and put it up on the door to my study.

The landscape reminds me of another Christmas decoration from my early childhood which I think was found not worth saving when my parents moved in the early 90s. It was a little village of home made cardboard houses, church included, and little people made of home made play dough (flour, water and salt), dried in the oven and then painted with watercolour. Each Christmas, my mum cleared the top shelf of my bookcase, rolled out a layer of white cotton wool over it, and then we placed the houses on top and built the village. There was also a little dam made by a mirror, on which people were ice-skating.  When we'd built the landscape, we finished off by sprinkling some boric acid crystals on top which made it glitter, like snow when it's really cold outside.

Most Christmases we spent alternating between my grandparents' houses which were about 15 or 20 kms apart (and 100 kms away from where we lived). Going by car between those places, in the dark, my brother and I used to count lighted Christmas trees in the gardens we passed on the way. Not as many of those back then (in the 60s and early 70s) as there are nowadays...