Happy Holidays! Sunday Post – December 27, 2020

December 28, 2020 Sunday Post 9

The Sunday Post is hosted by the wonderful Kimberly, the Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news, recap the past week, take a look ahead, and showcase our new treasures—I mean books!

Christmas Week

We had a better Christmas week than I anticipated, despite not being able to be with Robin or any of our extended family. Last weekend, we decorated for Christmas, including putting up the Christmas scene, a collection of small Christmas villages laid out under the tree (below.) It has been my family’s tradition for several generations. Most of the little houses and other buildings were made by my uncle, but my mother’s scene and ours also contain ceramic and resin houses in similar scale, like those designed by David Winter or the ones made by Tey Pottery in the UK.

2020 Christmas tree and villages

On Christmas Eve, we “attended” church via livestream, complete with a virtual pageant (each child filmed their part from home), and two virtual choir pieces that both Robin and I sang in. On Christmas Day we opened presents with Robin and my parents over Zoom, and cooked and ate a full Christmas turkey dinner. On Boxing Day, we had another Zoom get-together, this time also including my sister’s family and some close family friends. Now we are just relaxing and hanging out. Besides blogging, spinning, and of course reading, I will be making my sister’s eggnog cookies, which I didn’t get around to making before Christmas. (They are basically eggnog-flavored sugar cookies. They don’t have eggnog in them, but nutmeg, egg, and rum flavoring make them taste like it.)

Looking ahead to 2021

The Backlist Reader Challenge 2021

The Backlist Reader Challenge sign-up linky is live! Come join me in 2021 as we read books that have been on our TBR lists or piles for a good long while.

Last Week on the Blog

This Week on the Blog

  • My Favorite Books of 2020
  • My 2021 Reading Goals and Challenges – tentative
  • My Winter 2020-2021 TBR List – tentative
  • Sunday Post – 1/03/2020 – tentative

What I’m Reading/Watching

Reading: I continued my binge-reread of the Arcane Society novels. This week, I read Fired Up, The Burning Lamp, Midnight Crystal, In Too Deep, and I’m about halfway through Quicksilver.

Listening to: Christmas music! I kid you not, we have 81 hours of Christmas music on our house server. We’ve been listening to it (on shuffle) almost nonstop since about the 22nd.

Watching: We watched both of our favorite versions of A Christmas Carol: the George C. Scott version and the Patrick Stewart version. And we watched A Child’s Christmas in Wales (probably my favorite Christmas movie), and How The Grinch Stole Christmas.

Playing: Carcassonne, Merge Magic, and DragonVale.

Added to the Hoard

Christmas Gifts

I received some wonderful books for Christmas: some from my wish list, like the Chiltern Classics and The Dean’s Watch, and some that are new to me, like the Frances Brody mysteries. Print: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse; Death of an Avid Reader; A Death in the Dales; The Dean’s Watch (vintage copy); Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility. Kindle: Amendment of Life; Warbreaker (Click title for Goodreads page or my review.)

Purchased in the last 2 weeks (Kindle, print, or audio)

Book cover: A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik

Kindle: The Last Passenger; The Smoke Hunter; Modern Magick, Vol. 1; Finnikin of the Rock; The Steeplejack Series; The Cruel Prince; Love and Death Among the Cheetahs; A Duke, the Lady, and a Baby; Stormsong; The Empire of Gold; Time Enough for Love; Red Planet; Who Buries the Dead; A Deadly Education. Audiobooks (Audible, Libro.fm, or Chirp): Stormsong (Click title for Goodreads page or my review.)

Stay safe, stay healthy, stay kind… and may you find books a haven in the coming weeks.

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9 Responses to “Happy Holidays! Sunday Post – December 27, 2020”

    • Lark_Bookwyrm

      Thank you. It goes all the way back to my grandparents, so the tradition is 80-100 years old in our family, if not older. (My uncle was born in the early 1930s, and I’m guessing the tradition goes back at least that far.)

    • Lark_Bookwyrm

      Those Chiltern Classics were on my wish list — for the covers as much as the contents! I didn’t have good copies of either P&P or S&S.

      Have a wonderful new year!