For the last #Caturday of the year, one of the neighbourhood cats
obliged and did some tree climbing yesterday :-).

Back to regular postings after the Christmas holidays – more of the Sunflower from August!

It was slightly thawing this afternoon and it stopped snowing now, but the weather forecast promised more is on the way. Glad that we don’t have to go out until Monday!

So, this happened overnight. It’s not quite the snowy winter wonderland yet and more slushy-wet than powdery-dry, but it’s the first snow we had since February 2013! To be continued :-).

Here’s a bit of Amaryllis with some Christmas lighting in the background for the second day of Christmas – Boxing Day in some countries, but in Germany it’s still an official holiday.

Another fresh cactus flower photo from today – three blossoms are still open, but those will be the last probably until Spring. I’m actually posting less than I upload, but you can see all of this year’s photos since October either in their own Gallery here on my webspace or in the corresponding Google+ album – I may share some of the unposted ones as single images later, though!

On the 24th and 25th, it actually rained all the time. The night before Christmas eve, the tree had fallen over again and we had to pull it up and secure it with some better rope in the rain. But today we actually had blue skies and a bit of sun and the weather forecast says something about snow coming on the weekend – the temperature has already dropped to a point that snow might be a definitive possibility! So maybe there will be some snow photography soon :-).

More of the Christmas cactus matching the season – this is actually a photo from this afternoon! Made possible by my Christmas present, the new camera – I love how it captures the red tones.

I guess I should say Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays again, because in many countries the Christmas Holidays start not on the evening of the 24th like in Germany, but today! So here’s another version of our tree, processed from a different photo to be printed on 10×15 cards.

This is a very special photo from our archives, which has been used as a Christmas card lots of times in our family: it was originally taken by my mother Angela in 1962 on Mülheim’s Kirchenhügel, the church hill in the inner city. She won a photography contest with it and today it is of real historical significance because this photo cannot be taken in this way anymore. There are many copies and prints of this photo, but a couple of years ago I found the original transparency again and carefully scanned and restored it – and this is the first time we’re posting it on the web.