The year has just flown by...

This time last year, we were celebrating the opening of our new education andvisitors' center, with dignitaries galore, and crowds and festivities and displays and craftsmen, and so on. A culmination of years of work, 3 of which I had been a part. It really does seem like a great deal has transpired since. Well, doesn't just seem - actually has.
This table was part of the display, a representation of what we do with our Yuletide installation, which usually involves "dressing" a table in a "period" fashion with appropriate ceramics, silver, crystal, and of course, faux food from our extensive collection. Even the chairs around the table are antique - hence the ribbons and little signs reminding the crowds that they are for looking at and not sitting on. And all expertly created by some of our most experienced Yuletide curators, volunteer docents.
Part of the job that has fallen to me in the past year is the care and tending of our Teaching and Yuletide collections. This is a potentially huge project, due in part to the fact that we are talking about close to 2,500 objects to catalog, unpack, re-pack, inventory, keep glued together, etc.
Since then, we have also added a children's library of approximately 100 books - all of which seem to have become my responsibility. So let's see - my hats now include, besides chief bottle-washer to a director, and two 2 managers, being the calendar/attendance guru, the room set up guru, a curator, a registrar, a conservationist, a preparator, a librarian, an office manager, and an errand runner. That comes close to covering all of it. Oh. and there are those extra-curricular events where I go to represent us on a weekend, or weekday evening. Detail floods through my veins with astounding frequency.
I think one thing that has always been true of my life has been that I appreciate variety. I would get extremely stir crazy without a wide spectrum of activities, and without being able to learn something new. I guess I'm in the right place.

Yuletide arrives...

Three days later, and exhausted to the bone, we welcome you to Yuletide time at Bayou Bend. Yes, it is approximately six months in the making, actual "installing", and weeks in the showing to hundreds of usually delighted guests. Who would guess that it is such a production, even in a year when the materials and stoies told are a repeat from last year. (And that is really meant as a statement, not a question.)

Let the season begin! I went out on a limb with my church choir, suggesting they come because it is a delightful way to escape the madding crowds of the holidays. I hope that will still be true, even as museum "visibility" increases. There may not be much about waiting in a line or finding a parking place that is different from going to the mall, but I think we still try to find ways to keep it from being too unpleasant - there are cider and cookies, and hugely funny puppets. There are nostalgic trips to be taken in some of the rooms where toys from Christmases past are scattered on the floor.

There is music in an elevated clear tent that lets in the moon and starlight but protects one from the sometimes chilly wind. There are candles lighting the pathways through the gardens up to the house, and in theory, one could take as little or as much time as one desired to relax and be transported away from the craziness of the season. Who wouldn't want that? (Yes, that one was meant truly as a question.) We will hope for record numbers of visitors this year!