Notes on a Monday

This weekend, with weather so fair and days before Christmas so few, we had our busiest two days yet. Everyone seemed to be finding plenty of pleasing gifts and the mood was festive and fun. Today we are bushed, but it has been mercifully slow, with only a dozen or so customers coming in to look around and only a few purchases. We are looking forward to a long winter's nap tonight.

I wanted to share this picture today of the nativity set made by shop favorite Jane Kaufmann. We had good fun setting it up, using the shop's cactus to indicate the desert and setting the angel into flight by magic. (Ok, it's Jae's handy work with fishing line, see upper left.) We added the moose, cat, and snowman since we don't have any handmade donkeys, sheep, or other appropriate stable creature to include. But the set includes the 3 wise men, the angel Gabriel, 2 shepherds, Mary and Joseph, and the baby Jesus in a little manger. It is a little irreverent as her sculpture tends to be, but it makes for a wonderful holiday piece.

I also wanted to mention an article I read in the New York Times yesterday about how artists, artisans, and others in the "creative class" are moving out of NYC due to the increasingly high cost of living here compared with other cities around the country -- "New York, Once a Lure, Is Slowly Losing the Creative Set" by Jennifer Steinhauer. It's an interesting read, but it didn't tickle my feet -- Greenjeans is here to stay.