Since Paul’s birthday is the 24th, and mine is the 25th, and since it’s our first Christmas together, we decided we should Go Somewhere.  And since we had a really wonderful time in Charlotte last summer, we went back.  And of course, like pretty much everybody else on the eastern seaboard, we got snow.

Christmas eve morning we drove to Charlotte, and got a surprise along the highway:  we saw Santa Claus!  On a motorcycle!

The Dunhill hotel is a tiny little historic hotel – it has only 10 floors, and only about 4 rooms to each floor.  It nestles in next to the much taller, modern buildings downtown like a pretty little sparrow next to a bunch of … oh, I don’t know, tall, grey, elegantly angular birds.  Herons?

Christmas eve,  we headed over to the botanical gardens to see the wonderful Christmas lights display.  They had clearly reproduced a good deal of the summer-garden layout (light-sunflowers in the sunflower beds, light-wisteria hanging from the gazebo, etc.)  The best parts couldn’t be captured in a photo, though:  1) the  giant snowflakes hung way, way up high in some far-off trees (my camera simply wouldn’t catch them in the dark)  and 2) the simply lovely Christmas music being piped in all over the garden (guitars and harps and oboes doing good classic carols in the background, everywhere we walked).

We warmed up inside with hot chocolate (and a free “holiday activity” hosted by the gift shop:  making little rose and cedar sachets), and also in the beautiful orchid conservatory, where the volunteer guide pointed out a lemon tree, coffee and cocoa, a banana tree with bananas on it, and a black pepper vine.  (There were also some delightful little model railways running through the orchids.)

We ended the evening with a fantastic carriage ride around the whole garden.  The horses, Jake and Elwood, were positively enormous (about 22,000 pounds each, the driver said) and they were feeling pretty cheerful and trotting pretty darn quick.

Elwood bit me.

Well, he bit my sleeve.  But he could certainly have taken my arm off if he’d wanted to.  Here’s one of them (Jake and Elwood are pretty identical) in a summertime photo:  you have to picture two of these guys, standing at least 8 or 9 feet tall at the shoulder, in the dark, in the winter.

We got back much too late for any restaurants to be open, so we had a dinner of bread and cheese and pickles in the hotel room, which was perfect.

Christmas morning we opened presents, and watched some holiday movies on tv (er… Star Wars, actually, but that counts), and then went out for a walk.  The weather was cold but still clear, and downtown Charlotte had a giant decorated tree on nearly every corner.  We had a fantastic dinner at the hotel that evening, and everybody (including the waitress) was watching out the window to see if the precipitation, which had just begun, would turn into snow.  By Sunday morning, it certainly had!  At least a couple of inches of perfect fluffy snow covering everything – so of course we went out for another walk.

A giant gingerbread house!
The gingerbread house was built (as we could see by peeking through the sugar windows) over a plywood frame, but the whole thing was entirely covered with giant bricks of gingerbread and candy corbels.

Cute pictures of us (we took a lot of those):