Darkness

I feel like I begin most of my sentences nowadays with, "In Iceland ..." Well, in Iceland, Christmas is kind of a Big Deal, which is what happens when you get a lot of people of the same Christian/Pagan background together on an island that has very dramatic solstices. I believe Icelanders only get about 4 hours of light a day at this point.

We get a bit more than that, but it's still dark a lot of the time, and the lights make things nicer and very beautiful. In Iceland, everyone puts up Christmas lights, and they don't turn them off at night, so the towns glow perpetually through the season.

Yesterday we got a Christmas tree. Then a friend came to visit and we went out to dinner, then back home for hot chocolate and Bananagrams. Oh, and my mother played the piano. For some reason this post will only let me put the video at the end of the text, so there it is. And yes, that's me giggling at the end, I'm not sure why - I think it was the final BONG that got me.

We also went to a Christmas bazaar at the Episcopalian Church, because when we're not Quakers, we're Episcopalians. (And when we're not Episcopalians, we're atheists.) Except maybe I'll end up becoming a Lutheran one day, you know, when I'm living in Iceland.

The church in the framed photograph is the old Episcopalian church. The new (current) one was built in 1910. The first one had a different name and was built in 1761, but almost completely destroyed in the Revolution. In 1850 a new one was built (pictured), which lasted until the Episcopalians got some money to build a nicer, bigger stone one, which is modeled after a church in England. Next year, when I'm out of school, I'm hoping to take part in some of the restoration work on the old Episcopalian cemetery, where several Revolutionary War soldiers are buried.