Let It Snow!

It's been a mild, mild kick-off to the winter season in Wisconsin so far.  We didn't harvest our last Swiss chard until Thanksgiving, and we're still getting bits of thyme and sage.  JoyMama has enjoyed bike-commuting to work into December, and JoyDad has appreciated the reprieve from snow-removal.

Rose, however, was pining for snow, making wistful observations about the chances of a white Christmas.

Sometimes, though, when you have no snow, you make your own!

This photo is from Saturday, a clear, relatively-mild day for December.  That white stuff that Joy is gleefully kicking looks for all the world like snow, but look a little closer...

That's not snow, it's cattail fluff!  Turns out that the brown part of the cattail is actually made up of densely-packed seeds, each attached to a bit of fluff to carry it away on the wind.  When you unpack a dried cattail, it explodes into more "snow" than you ever thought possible!  (Even up close, it looks a little like frost-tracings, doesn't it?)

Fortunately, at least to the girls' minds, we had no need to turn to the cattails on Sunday:

Above is the scene in our garden, glorious sticky mantle-of-white all over the fence and the stacked tomato-cages.

And there goes Joy, ready to revel!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...