Start of Christmas season.

The first Christmas tree I've ever put up by myself.

Here's a picture of a Christmas tree I bought a week ago. It's 3 or 4 feet high, cost 20,000 won at Kim's Club, and came in a set with the lights and decorations you see here. I put it up today, Thanksgiving weekend, the time when a lot of folks put up their decorations back home. Thanksgiving is the start of Christmas season for me, although the halls of Lotte World were decked with seasonal decorations when I went three weeks ago.


The kit I bought from Kim's Club.

Since I have a romantic view of Christmas, I found it hard to trim the Charlie Brown tree without Christmas music. There are 11 different channels of continuous Christmas-related music and audio programs available from AOL Radio, and I prefer "XM Holiday Traditions."

I also enjoy German-language Christmas carols, my favorite being "Es ist ein Ros entsprungen," one of the most beautiful songs around, in my opinion. There's a video of it on Youtube here, by The Young Tenors, and a nice choral arrangement by the Windsbacher Kinderchor is available here at about the 1:30 mark. The best version I've heard is by the King's Singers, though I recommend downloading it from Limewire or another p2p program, because the Youtube version isn't so hot. Christmas is about the only time of the year when I regret being so lacksidasical about my German studies in high school and college.