The icing says it all...Merry Christmas. The flow of visitors today has been nonstop, thankfully no one's staying for dinner but the cake's almost finished. I guess it's been a good Christmas :)

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Christmastime.... a time for friends.

Of course, friends are always there for you but it's hard to see them all the time. These are all people that I got to know via the Net, and they're all great people! (especially my baby *wink*)

Oh btw, tinks, I'm the one in glasses wearing black with a red muffler. Turned out I had an op to put up something better than a shadow profile!

On Christmas Eve, the story goes,

an enchantment falls upon the earth.
It is a time when the Spirit of a new-born child
whose name is Love, possesses the world.

The way to Christmas lies through an ancient gate.....
it is a little gate, child-high, child-wide,
and there is a password:
"Peace on earth to men of good will."

May we all, this Christmas,
become as a little child again
and enter into His kingdom.

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I've always loved books. In the past I was a voracious bookworm, albeit a choosy one, but now as I laughingly explain to anyone who cares to listen, ever since I got high-tech I haven't had much time for books anymore. Any spare moment and I'm either at my computer or tweaking my cellphone. But once in a while I do still read a good book and I count myself incredibly fortunate to have been able to lay hands earlier this year on Memoirs of a Geisha which was a fabulous eye-opening read, and just a couple of days ago, Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner.

I'd read the review of Runner some time ago but it hadn't really prepared me for the absorbing quality of the book. And the ambience helped some because I began reading it amid the dirt and gravel of the local cemetery where I was keeping an eye on the workers repairing my parents' gravesites. It turned out to be fascinating... and part of its' fascination lies in the fact that it's about a country that I've never really had much interest in. Sure I'd heard about the "forgotten war", of the inhumanly repressive Taliban regime, of the US playing Big Brother and ousting the black ones in the aftermath of 9/11... all the stuff that comes on the BBC and CNN. But The Kite Runner brings all that to life and in a neatly worked out plot whose careful construction reminds me of one of my favourite contemporary writers, Amitav Ghosh (if you haven't read his The Shadow Lines yet, do it pronto). Also, both Memoirs and Runner are about cultures other than the usual American/western which don't really have anything new much to offer anymore. Kudos to Mr Hosseini for this brilliant piece of writing.

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