Monday, January 15, 2024

Fun Old-Fashioned Family Pre-Christmas Events, 1

Cary has a number of interesting Christmas-time traditions and celebrations. Last year I documented the very considerable downtown Cary Christmas decor. This year we visited the North Carolina Festival of Lanterns, held annually in Cary, a few pix from which appear below. Also documented in this and the next post are a number of other events in the run-up to the traditional fun old-fashioned Sherouse family Christmas, which we enjoyed yet again this year at Rebecca and Jeremy's house in Cary. 
The festivities began with Penelope's appearance in Young Sherlock;
theater and stagecraft are now her favorite extra-curricular activities

A Raleigh tradition is Christmas at the Angus Barn restaurant


Imagine room after room of such Christmas decor; the food, mostly
steak, was good too

P at her Jazz Dance expo
Christmas decor at our apartment (thanks, Marie)

On December 21st, P and I baked brownies, hoping to offer a Stonehenge
replica for the Solstice; though tasty, the brownies were architecturally
unsound, and I later characterized our creation as a replica of Stonehenge,
1940, after the Stukas had bombed...


















Auntie Rachel arrived from DC and we all toured the North Carolina
Festival of Lanterns
It's an extensive and visually stunning take on the Chinese lantern festival,
a very old festival of light, a tradition in most religions...this of course is
a very 21st century version in materials and exterior illumination...

Still pretty stunning...brought to us by Tianyu Arts and Culture, Inc.

Excellent signage; and in English too, although most visitors,
including yours truly, are pretty completely ignorant of the
relevant Chinese characters, myth, legends, etc.

Absolutely nothing to do with Christmas, nor even Chinese New
Year...

Stage performances too

Rudolph? Bambi?

Santa? Gandalf?

Disney princesses? Rhinemaidens?

The Dragon Ship that later (in January) was sunk by a windstorm,
shutting the whole show down a few days prematurely; Divine Wind

One wonders whether they will do similar shows in Taiwan



Saturday, January 6, 2024

Colonial Williamsburg, 2

Continuing our early December visit to Colonial Williamsburg...

Barrels of fun

Touring the Governor's Palace




A special treat for me was hearing this guy (Dean Shostak) playing
Ben Franklin's Armonica (and also glass bells and even a glass violin);
I'd first seen one of Franklin's Armonicas in far-away Colmar, but
had never heard one...

Touring another house...as owners of a roomful of Statton Oldtowne
cherry Queen Anne we really enjoyed seeing all the OBF (old brown
furniture)

Peyton Randolph House (owner of many plantations)

Huge old oak catching the autumnal sunset

Everyone loves a parade...I'm up in the warm courthouse, out of
the wind, loving the parade, while Ken is shooting and Vicki and Susan
are shivering on the bench

Much more back in the museum...

Nearly a whole wall of Peaceable Kingdoms

Tons of Americana, colonial and later



We love the Primitives


More good eats at Christina Campbell's Tavern; although some
said the chicken wasn't so good

Furniture making and re-making

Including an harpsichord

More education and enlightenment at the wheelwright's

Paper and printing downstairs

In session at the old courthouse

But wait, there's more

On the way back to Cary, we took a short-cut, the ferry across
the James River estuary; perhaps the world's only free ferry

Nonetheless reminding us of similar boat-rides in Norway and New Zealand,
even the ferry not taken in Turkey...


Colonial Williamsburg, 1

Not long after we arrived in Cary, college friends Susan and Ken invited us to accompany them on a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. What transpired in early December was one of the best short trips we've had, in part because of the company but also in part because of the exceptional place we visited. We'd been to Colonial Williamsburg years before--day visits with kids--but now we had the opportunity to spend three off-season week-days there, with ample time to interact with the "re-enactors" (more anon), to really savor what is a fine research and educational institution, indeed the largest living museum there is. BTW, we found nothing candy-coated about the place...the negatives as well as the positives of the society and times were well evident.

Colonial Williamsburg has a fine website, with many pix, much commentary, and several virtual tours as well (https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/learn/virtual-tours/?from=home), so I won't attempt any more here than posting some of our better pix with relevant commentary. Vicki and I thoroughly enjoyed the visit and are certain to return. Thanks, Susan and Ken, for rousing us from our down-sizing doldrums!

We stayed at the Colonial Williamsburg Lodge

On one of the several house tours

Street scene; the foregoing and immediately following by Ken

Posing our last day there in front of the Governor's palace

The plan: Ken and Susan are very organized travelers

At the witchcraft trial our first night there

At the blacksmith's shop: these are no mere "re-enactors"...they
are really practicing the trade as it was done in colonial times and
appear free to come and go out of character as the circumstances
warrant...they all have a canned intro for the casual or hurried
visitor...but if you stay a bit, you can have a long, detailed, and 
edifying conversation...we saw this in every house, every workshop...
the intersection  of technology and science is always fascinating...

Revered in Virginia because of the tobacco thing, I suppose;
executed as a traitor long before there was a colonial Williamsburg

In the apothecary shop

Really gnarly old tree

Susan and Vicki approach the capitol

Among the meeting rooms

Getting educated about colonial governance

Rifling at the gunsmith's

Street scene; OK, this is not what it would have looked like in
1760, but some concessions have to be made...

Christmas decor competition (appetizer foreshadowing)

At the silversmith's

Wigmaker

Champion wreath

Research and preservation going on all over

Among our several visits to the excellent museum

Eating well, as often as possible...a great captain's plate at Berret's;
preceded by the cheapest oysters I've had since France, as foreshadowed

Goodwin preached at the Bruton Parish church as well as other
places in the East; was an unrelenting advocate for the preservation of
Virginia's historical buildings and artefacts; hit the jackpot when
he interested Rockefeller ("Praise John from whom oil blessings
flow") in the project; we found ourselves sitting beneath the plaque
during a concert at the Bruton; erected by "friend and fellow worker" John D. 

Weaving

Several of the Founders did time in Williamsburg, Virginia's
capital until the Seven Years War (aka the French and Indian
War)

It would be another two generations before Thomas Crapper
was born...yes, I enjoy perpetuating the "over-statement" of
Wallace Reyburn's playful biography Flushed With Pride...