photography, Reviews, San Miguel de Allende

Christmas Market (updated): Like sifting through holiday boxes in Grandma’s attic

Strolling through the Christmas Market at Mercado de San Juan de Dios in San Miguel de Allende is a lot like rooting through the boxes of holiday decorations in your grandmother’s attic.

Amid all the tinsel and strings of lights and shiny garlands and Manger figurines there is a lot of cool stuff that would look great on your tree or mantle or coffee table. Some of the designs look unchanged over the decades.

I’ll bet you could process the whole history of Christmas ornamentation in a walk around the Mercado.

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fiction, Rants and raves, Reviews, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

The last Christmas movie you’ll ever have to read

News headline: Hallmark has created 42 movies for the holiday.

Subsequently, House Beautiful magazine gushed about the  “comforting predictability of these flicks … No matter which title you switch on, the best thing about a Hallmark holiday movie is knowing that pretty soon you’ll be watching a happy ending.”

I don’t know if people who watch all 42 of these movies get a participation medal or a stay at the sanatorium. And Hallmark isn’t the only one flooding the zone. Somebody, noticing the overwhelming whiteness of characters in Hallmark movies, began putting out ethnic versions with the same insipient stories.

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