There it is ... the return of the light!

As I write this we already gained a few minutes of daylight since the shortest day of the year on the 21st and it's officially winter!
I celebrated the solstice by lighting the candle on my Yule wreath:

For us this holiday season, which last pretty much the whole month of December, is more the 'Holly Jolly' kind of celebration, following the pagan traditions of bringing in a tree and lighting a fire (well, a 'fake' tree and a candle in our case) enjoying good food, watching sappy movies and listening to cheerful songs about Santa, reindeer, and snowmen.

Just like mankind has done for many, many years ... except for the movies of course.

                                   

We had such a low key and relaxed couple of days, spend mostly inside and in our lounge sweats, that I barely took any pictures except from the food .. of course:



And even the food was very simple this year, store-bought Panatone, cream-pie and Tiramisu, (frozen) Lasagna, some ready-made snacks .. although I did make the deviled eggs and the seafood-soup on Christmas eve.
Totally perfect!

I'd bought myself some great presents:

                                           

                        Two Paint-by-number sets and several small embroidery kits!

I'd ordered a few things through Temu lately, just to see if it was legit, and since everything went OK I tried some more and I must say I'm very impressed.
Everything arrives just fine, looks and works as advertised and this whole order cost me $40, which is an absolute steal!

To stay in the laid-back, relaxed spirit-of-the-season we've spend several evenings lately playing games and we like it a lot!
Here we're playing 'Mexican Train', one of our favorite domino-varieties:

It can get rowdy, but we try to keep it civil!

We're pretty much forced to spend most of our time indoors these days since the weather is quite terrible.
It just doesn't stop raining:

 

The Yamhill River, which runs through both Sheridan and Willamina, and who's trail along the shore is part of my morning walking routine, is way up.



Both towns are in the flood zone and the city has set up sandbag filling stations:

We are high enough above it all and although the ponds on the property have filled up completely, the big culverts in all three of them keep them from overflowing by draining into the lower one all the way down.

The full ponds do attract different ducks lately. This pair of  Hooded Mergansers (although no hoods were up) arrived in the pouring rain but didn't stay very long ..

  

The combination of soggy, saturated soil and a gusty night with several very strong gusts that had the RV shake, rattle and roll .. well, fortunately not 'roll' .. brought one of the large oaks on the edge of the grove down:

   

Fortunately no damage to any structures and it didn't even bring any others with it since it fell neatly out of the row and into the field.
I'm keeping a careful eye on the others when I walk through them!

Every now and than we have some clearings with blue sky in between showers and the sun will be out for a few hours:



And we see a lot of rainbows, this was almost a full one:

        

This one was very wide and bright, unfortunately the picture doesn't really do it justice ..

Like I said, the light is coming back, today we gain another whopping 41 seconds, but since December and January are Oregon's rain months we'll probably have a lot more rain coming our way.

Having said that I'm still keeping my hopes up for some snow this winter. So far nothing, but when I checked last winter's blog I found we didn't have snow until the 12th of January so who knows .. I'm keeping my fingers crossed!