Christmas, Attorney Generals and Fraternities.

I have just spent the last two days helping decorate christmas trees and lay out a Christmas bazaar. The Churchill museum hosts a Victorian Christmas every year, but they hold it nice and early, november 11th to be precise. It seems Halloween merges into Thanksgiving, which merges into Christmas. The decorations don't really come down, they just change slightly. The temperatures have been in the 70's in the day, so to me it feels very unlike Christmas. However, I love decorating trees, so have had fun.
I was made to do the British tree first, worst luck.

As you can see, it is fairly vile. The ornaments, all of which are for sale, are collectors items and therefore not cheap. There are Big Ben baubles, bulldogs (yuk), red telephone boxes, crowns and the like. Not my idea of decoration, some of it not particularly british, but all in a good cause.
Some of the others are better, the children's one is absolutely smothered in toys.

To start the event off they serve british tea- PG tips and sandwiches and biscuits in the day, then cocktails and shopping in the evening. There seem to be a lot of these sorts of events in Fulton. You end up eating a lot of gunk if your'e not careful.

While this is all going on they have a celebration of the anniversary of the donation of their large outdoor sculpture, which is basically a large chunk of the Berlin wall. It stands next to the church.

It is sculpture, because Edwina Sands, a granddaughter  of Churchill, carved two human figure shaped holes in it and entitled it Breakthrough.
This could have been a nice little ceremony, the weather was perfect, and the setting is lovely. They made the mistake of inviting ex Attorney General, John Ashcroft, to give the address. A controversial choice I gather, as he is a man not known for his liberal tendencies. The president has been bombarded with emails complaining about him coming and an 'un-invite him' campaign was set up on facebook. Well you have never heard such a lot of drivel in your life. It was embarrassing. He hadn't even got any structure to his speech, just a lot of waffle. He talked about Reagon as if he was Jesus Christ and was most unimpressive. He got a standing ovation from quite a few of those that turned up. Roland and I sat and didn't clap. I hope it was noted! Sad and rather worrying to think that people like that get into quite powerful positions. They anticipated protests of some sort, but nothing happened. Everyone is too polite!

I think we may finally be hitting colder weather. By the weekend, the temperature will have dropped over 20 degrees. The skies look quite threatening sometimes.

No rain for a month now, but we may get some tomorrow. As predicted, Roland has a brand new Walmart winter coat to cope with whatever comes. I knew he wouldn't be able to resist. He is developing a fondness for the men's clothes section and spends ages looking at the stuff.

Roland was invited to dine at one of the fraternities on tuesday. I don't really understand fraternities, but they all seem to have greek letters as names and seem a bit like houses in private schools. People join the fraternity their dad was a member of. Weird. I'm going to have to find out more about them.

These are some of the Frat houses lined up along Westminster avenue. They are like small boarding houses.
As usual dinner was at 6 and the whole thing was over by 7.15! Of course they are not allowed to drink alcohol. These are alcohol free premises, so the party never really gets going. Not much of an occasion.

The next item on the agenda is Roland giving a lecture at Washington University in St Louis, and then it's Thanksgiving.
I was hoping to get an invitation to share Thanksgiving with an american family and sure enough, we have had one. I want to see how it's all done- Missouri style. Should be fun.