Friday: The Second Day of Christmas

I hope to do at least a picture blog post of both

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 

My pictures are just now being backed up and typical of myself,

I had nearly 600 pictures LOL in the last THREE days.

So I am going to have some work to do on that!

***

I will just begin about today then, but first saying that

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day had a lot of beauty

and a lot of blessings.

***

So, I last left you with pictures of my table set up for today's

breakfast, one of the moments I look forward to all year.

So all week, even though I have tried for better, I have not gotten

more than 6 hours of sleep in one night.  It's just the way it goes sometimes.

***

I was so very excited about the beauty of our Christmas breakfast table.

I was all set, I had made my new Christmas tea that I was given,

I had pictures done of the table, Mr Husband was standing by our icons

on the buffet behind our table, where I have candles burning,

and I had just poured myself a glass of kombucha out of the very heavy

large GT Kombucha bottles.

I turned to look at my Husband and I think I was only holding the

bottle with one hand...the next thing I knew,

the kombucha bottle, heavy glass bottle when empty,

my Husband is guessing full it weights 8lbs, 

crashed to the table, right onto my Christmas tree plate, the beautiful

gold rimmed wreath-and-berry bowl (as I see it) and on the 

salad plate as well, all of them broken, kombucha and shards of pottery

everywhere.  I was so shocked, it was such a loud crash and break

and I just started sobbing, though without tears; being overtired,

the unexpected noise and breakage and that I did not think

I could replace the bowl, of which I only had 3 and used at 

Christmas time.  I felt like I broke Christmas for us, 

I was so distraught.  I had just used the 3 bowls for our Christmas dinner

with Photini, had used them for our Christmas family day,

which is the 2nd day of Christmas (i.e. today), I was feeling everything

from sadness to guilt at being sad at a small thing, a beloved bowl and 

Christmas dishes breaking, ... I know that for me experiences and the dishes I use

for them, that I use yearly at Christmas or at Easter or for my Husband's birthday or

for our family Slava and wedding anniversary in September,

they all become precious to me because of this. 

As if the memory of the time is imprinted in the dishes I use,

or the meals I made year after year. 

Not to mention the pandemic we are still going through; 

so perhaps it all broke in my sobs when I saw the broken pottery.

at one of my most favourite moments of the year,

Christmas breakfast 

(we never had this the day of Christmas as we don't eat breakfast as we

are fasting for Holy Communion). ... 

so that was a hard moment. 

***

Thankfully my Husband was a super hero, turning around when he

heard the loud crash, a sobbing wife, broken pottery, a kombucha bottle

fully intact but spilling kombucha.

We cleaned it up, later he helped me do a google search.

I found this:

"BTW, this Noritake "M" backstamp with the ribbon/bow at the bottom was used between 1933 and 1953, but with only "Made in Japan" means it was made before WWII. After WWII it would have said "Made in Occupied Japan." "1933 "M" EXPORT MAINLY FOR USA MARKET Registered 1933 (Variety of Patterns)" (Cited from: https://www.antiquers.com/threads/noritake-gold-morimura-mark-help-with-pattern-id.14886/)" 

So we understood that the bowl that broke was made

 between 1933-1945 according to this website.

At first, while we found this information, I could not find the exact bowl.

I knew I wanted to replace it, maybe I would find something similar in colouring but different

in pattern and just accept that.

But then I was looking on my phone at replacements.com and realized that their search

box had a camera icon in it and I allowed the website to use my camera on my phone,

took a picture of the bowl and nearly instantaneously, they had the EXACT pattern

and they had this bowl! actually they had 3 of them! 

and with tax and shipping, it would only be about 10$ per bowl.  

AND I had birthday money I had been saving.

So, after conferring with Mr Husband, I bought all 3. 

It will mean I will have 5 total.  So that's really nice! 

I found some Christmas tree spode as well that I plan on ordering soon,

using the rest of my birthday money.

So that's really nice.  

It was sad about the breakage but (praying that the packages are not stolen!) 

hopefully I will be replacing everything that broke, 

which is so consoling for me.

***

Well, the rest of the day went smoothly.

We rested, opened some presents, got our yearly takeout on the second day of Christmas,

took a walk, had dinner, it was good.

***

I feel like, in my life, the sudden bowl breakage was like a symbol of 

how so much has broken this year.

How much lost.

And while things can be recovered, like the blessing of replacing the bowls, 

some things are not; like the broken pottery; we threw it away.

There really was nothing else I could do with it but that.

So those three things, the dinner plate, salad plate and bowl,

they remained broken. 

***

Well.  No matter what, yesterday (for us) was Christmas. Today was the second day of

Christmas.  We hope for a peaceful weekend and more rest.

***

May God have mercy on us and save us!