I believe that this year is the most Christmasy of any since I have moved to Phuket. Which suits this lover of the holiday very much. The new Central Floresta shopping center adjacent to where I work in the Central Festival mall is particularly festive and I have taken to wandering around the connected buildings each afternoon, discovering new areas of decoration. While I always get melancholy during this time of the year as I miss my family and friends in North America and elsewhere, watching tourists and residents alike take delight in their shopping makes me feel much happier.
This slideshow concentrates primarily on the Yuletide garnishments of Central Floresta with a few images of Central Festival as well, and will probably be my last post for Asian Meanderings prior to the 25th. I will spend most of Christmas Day visiting several local schools dressed as Santa Claus. At the moment, I do not have any Christmas Eve plans but the day after is the 15th anniversary of the Boxing Day Tsunami so I will attend at least one memorial service on the 26th (hopefully coinciding with that morning’s 3-hour solar eclipse….).
A brief mention of something else very Christmasy that I have been working on. My main stamp blog, Philatelic Pursuits, is featuring separate articles for many of the Christmas stamps that have been released throughout the world this year. I have images for most of them and I discover more each and every day. There is an index page that lists all of the stamp issues and links to my articles for each (the text for the majority of these comes directly from the various entities’ own philatelic agency descriptions, some of which are poorly machine-translated). I hope you like seeing these many representations of the holiday as much as I do.
Merry Christmas!
Mark Joseph Jochim 