Last Thursday my mother and I had our annual Christmas shopping trip in downtown Toronto. For what is likely the first time ever, I bought more gifts for other people and hardly anything for myself. We took photos in front of the Christmas tree inside The Eaton Centre:

Last year the tree had a rainbow colour scheme which you can see here. Nathan Phillips Square had its enormous tree all lit and I took a photo of my mother in front of it:

Unfortunately several cascades of lights in the rear had burned out from the top of the tree to the bottom, so I had to position my mother such that there were no visible sides of the tree that were blacked out.

One of the pleasures of Christmas buying this year is shopping for the members of my Tristan host family. I am loving shopping for nine-year-old Dylan, twelve-year-old Janice and fifteen-year-old Kimberley. The last mail delivery before Christmas had already arrived on the Baltic Trader on 27 November. I had sent my Christmas cards to Tristan shortly after arriving back home in mid-October, and I have heard from one of the recipients that my card had arrived. Oddly, the card I had mailed to the Greens did not make it in the Baltic Trader mail delivery, although it was mailed at the same time as the other card I sent.

If I wanted my Christmas presents to arrive in time then I would have had to shop immediately after my arrival back home, but even then, that would be no guarantee that my presents would get there by Christmas. In Tristan, you’ve got to mail your stuff early, and I’m thinking I should have gone shopping while I was still in Cape Town. My package is perhaps not even going to make the next delivery to Tristan, which is scheduled to leave Cape Town on 11 January. The next mail delivery after that doesn’t arrive in Tristan until the third of April.