Thanksgiving

Happy December! Yesterday I got out my box of holiday decorations. Drunken Santa is still around, but Кит's Christmas hat disappeared. (Кит is not-so-secretly thrilled about this.) 

We also bought a little ёлка, Christmas tree, for $10. It's our first living Christmas tree and it's actually rosemary, so I've been snipping pieces off to flavor food. Are you putting up a ёлка this year? Would you consider getting one that you can eat?

Last year we spent Thanksgiving with D's family, eating our way through stacks of blini, bowls of borsch, and plates of plov. This year we had a low-key weekend at the coast with my family-

Don't be fooled- they're nothing like a Moscow mule :/

It rained like crazy for most of the weekend. D wore flip-flops and foul weather gear for walks in the rain, since any other defense against the weather was useless. The water was so high on the beach that it was impassable a lot of the time. It did clear up on Friday. My brother went out for a run-

 

- while D and I just walked along the water.

 Then D lost a bet with an incoming wave; the rocks looked okay at first...

but they got swamped by a big wave.

Both the wave and D in retreat already.

After that, he gave up on staying dry and waded his way down the beach. It was pretty funny to watch from the dry part of the sand :p

During another break in the weather, we hiked up to a hang glider overlook. Can you imagine jumping off of this place and soaring out over the trees? Wild!

D wanted me to include a picture of mushrooms that he spotted during that walk. He's always taking pictures of these things. Sometimes I'll scroll through the photos on his phone and find random pictures of mushrooms. (I'm guessing that some of you ladies are nodding along at this- Polly and Jasilyn?)

And... wow, now it's December already. Almost time for Ukraine to go all out for Новый год, New Years. Kharkiv is already putting up all the usual decor in Freedom Square- pictures here. Kyiv is going to cut down this 82-year-old tree and decorate "with a thousand ornaments, a 3-km garland, and 42,000 little lanterns"- video here, story here. I'll just try to keep our little tree alive and not use too much of it for cooking, haha.