This Great Work

 We were really looking forward to our Christmas open house.  Our freezer was filling up.  Wedding cookies. Candied nuts.  Ginger snaps.  Mini butterhorn rolls.  Chocolate mint crinkle cookies.  Peanut butter kiss cookies (with M&M's).  Caramels. Chocolate bark.  I had made salsa and special ordered corn chips. I had ordered Jolly Time popcorn (Chinese popcorn pops very differently, not to our liking). I had ordered cute toothpicks for a veggie/cheese pick.  I had procured a Christmas table runner, cute serving platters and small paper plates that said "Merry Christmas".  I hoarded cranberries to make stove top potpourri to make our apartment smell like Christmas.  Many of these were smallish feats given baking and Christmas supplies here.  But as Christmas drew closer, lock downs were beginning to happen very near us.  The city started reporting 20-30 new cases a day which seemed to be alarming officials.  Schools were tightening, one of our friends' complex lock

 After our passport pictures last June and the cultural experience that that was, I decided that we would go back for Christmas photos.  I wasn't as surprised this time, but I was still absolutely fascinated by what we experienced. A little background: The Chinese people do not celebrate Christmas.  They are Buddhists, not Christians (but more are accurately atheists with Buddhist influence).  Yet this country produces almost everything we use across the world to decorate and celebrate Christmas, so Christmas items have spilled out into their lives to some degree.  They don't understand that it is a religious holiday and that many of the things we use to decorate and celebrate are symbols of Jesus Christ (or have originated from symbols of Him).  We have been told that some people do give gifts and a few put up trees.  But all they really know of the celebrations comes from images or media displaying Christmas.  They have no idea of the why.  Or what kinds of things people do

While in quarantine, I became well acquainted with Taobao (Chinese Amazon) because I needed some Christmas decorations. Taobao has a lifesaving feature for me:  you can search by photograph.  That means that I can find whatever I want on Amazon, then use the search-by-photo feature and find that same item on Taobao.  Sweet.  I don't have to do too much translating.  Wonderful feature.  Works well.  Semi-mostly. (I'm starting to sound Chinese.) Remember this is China and what you see is not what you get.     Case in point:  my Christmas tree.  I ordered  a 7ft (2.1m) prelit tree.  This image looks *exactly* like the picture I found on Amazon. Here is what arrived:  As it turns out, it wasn't prelit, but it did come with two strands of 100 lights.  Nice. What to do other than get back on Taobao and order some lights and a heck of a lot more garnishings than I had because there are enough gaps to throw a cat through this tree... I waited patiently for my lights to arrive.  Whe