How Unfortunate

I'm a little perplexed as to how I made it so far into the Christmas season without any Christmas photos.  That's so unlike me--especially since the tree has been up for weeks.  Puhhhlease.  Like I have the self control to wait until after Thanksgiving.

I could stare at the tree for hours.  And in my opinion, wrapped presents are even better than opened presents.  I think I'd be perfectly happy wrapping empty boxes and skipping presents so long as the packages all tied up with string could remain forever under the tree.  Presents are to be looked at but never touched...or so I tell the furry ones.  They disagree as they battle for territory under the tree.  But in the end, the presents will prevail, because I said so.

And of course, the other fabulousness that is Christmas is ready to commence: Christmas baking.  I spent a lovely Sunday afternoon with a group baking and decorating sugar cookies, because you have to have sugar cookies.  Just a few pics I took....my cookies are the plain white ones of course.

Baking in this house though is just in the prep phase.  Not sure why, but I like to make the dough first and bake them separately.  Okay, I totally know why--try not to mock me.  See, making dough just makes a huge flour mess all over your kitchen. Isn't it much better to make all the dough, clean up the mess and then bake cookies in a slightly more clean and less messy environment?  Who me?  Type A?

Cookie baking is currently scheduled for Friday.  The youngest one is having a little surgical alteration on Thursday so Friday is Spay recovery and baking Christmas cookie day.  What a lovely combination.

Kind of a small interesting photography tidbit in this photo.  If I told you I shot this last photo with a Canon 50mm prime lens, you could deduce from the bokeh on the tree, which lens was used.  The 50mm F/1.8 has a 5 blade diaphragm which results in a bokeh that looks more pentagon in shape.  The  50mm F/1.4 has 8 blades which results in an octagonal shape and the 50mm f/1.2, well that's an L lens and just has perfectly, delightfully round bokeh. Or so I'm told  This particular photo was shot at  f/4 so the octagon is more apparent.  Opening the aperature up to 1.8 or 1.4 minimizes shape differences slightly and bokeh appears rounder with all lenses.   Kind of nerdy fun knowledge yes?