By special request...

As requested by Elisa in England, here is a picture of me and Deon, with his Nanny when we were home in Ontario for Thanksgiving. As you can see, the weather was a wee bit warmer than it is here in Tuktoyaktuk, and we were enjoying every minute of it!

Ho Ho Ho...

Christmas has arrived in the apartment, as I set up our makeshift Christmas tree this evening. Deon and I created this Arctic version of a tree earlier this fall in light of the fact that we don't really want to have a Christmas tree up here. It would take up too much space to store, and we're not here for Christmas anyway. But! We do have this tree which we constructed from driftwood. Deon took a log, and chiseled a hole the right size for a large branch (the trunk) to be wedged into. He then drilled holes at different angles through the "trunk," and I stuffed sticks of decreasing lengths through the holes, to make it into the shape of a Christmas tree.

After a somewhat bad/annoying day at work, I decided that this weekend would be my Christmas decorating weekend. I pulled out our stick-tree, and asked Deon to pick up some decorations at the Northern when he went to check the mail. I had noticed that the Northern was starting to unpack their Christmas decorations, etc yesterday, so that may also have contributed to my festive mood. That, and the fact that it is also the first blizzard of the season outdoors, and there is a lot of snow falling and blowing around.

My specific instructions were that Deon pick out the cheapest decorations possible, because here they are at least 2 times the price you would pay down south, or you could probably even find the same ones at Dollarama! I also had 6 ornaments from last year, including 2 that we bought last November in Yellowknife, and 4 from a sale at Zellers in Edmonton on the way back up north last year. I also had some blue Christmas minilights from decorating my desk at work last year, so I was pretty much set.

After work tonight, I piled those decorative balls of different colours onto the tree, and strung on the lights, and here you have it, a Northern Christmas tree (please ignore the bamboo wall decal in the background which sort of detracts from the winter-y feeling, hah):





May the happy holidays begin!!

p.s. On another note- those pumpkins that were $27.99 at the Northern before Halloween went up in price to $34.99 the day before Halloween, dropped down to $21.99, on "sale" the day after Halloween, and now they're at a rock bottom price of $9.99. And we're not talking big pumpkins here!!!

Happy Thanksgiving

Yesterday was my first attempt at making a Thanksgiving dinner, for the most part, on my own. I had a gift certificate left from last Christmas from work for a free turkey, so a few weeks ago I cashed that in. (Buying a turkey here in Tuk would be $100- but they were marked down to $80 on sale). Recipes included "the perfect roast turkey" and "prize pumpkin pie." Other items included a cranberry sauce, Swedish mashed potatoes, turkey gravy, and sourdough rolls made with the help of the bread machine. Christine brought cooked carrots and homemade stuffing.

Everything turned out very well, considering it was my first attempt at a turkey, and considering that the power was out for seven hours on Sunday afternoon, my preparation time.

There were no trees with coloured leaves or pumpkins this weekend in the Arctic, and I must say, I do miss those parts of Thanksgiving.

I took some pictures of the spread, and posted them below:





Happy Thanksgiving to family and friends at home :)