Denuding the House

Twelfth Night (5th Jan) has come and gone; epiphany (6th Jan) has done the same thing.

Two thousand and ten years ago, according to popular legend, Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar had remounted their camels (ooh, matron) and were once more heading off eastwards.
To celebrate this momentous anniversary Mrs The Millbrooker and Dozybean spent the day dismantling the Millbrooker Towers Christmas decorations.

Here's Mrs The Millbrooker with a dangling Father Christmas newly unpinned from the wall and seemingly hanging from somewhere delicate, held aloft only by some grinning reindeer.And here's Dozybean clearing the tree of that annual foliage cover-all, lametta. Must say it's rather nice not to keep bumping into tinselly objects, and even nicer to be able to put my lovely new Christmas present Toby and character jugs on proper display, unencumbered by plaster models of Father Christmas and fold-up paper snowmen.

May I introduce to you a Toby jug proper (i.e. a full figure, not just head-and-shoulders, which would be a character jug), Betsy:Another present from this year, the character jug of Old Uncle Tom Cobbley. A family connection there as my namesake ancestor known from the 1811 census eloped from Widdicombe-in-the-Moor to Newton Abbot; from whence he founded the paternal branch of my family tree: a seemingly endless stream of Devonshire-dwelling illiterate paupers and china clay workers which retained that status until someone got the bare scrapings of an education somewhere around 1900.

And finally, given to a grateful Millbrooker last year and the beginning of this mini collection, a character jug of The Pied Piper of Hamlyn (once again, a connection there, I played The Pied Piper twice in separate productions of the musical version by Neville Lewisohn and David Adams).

My thank yous go to Mrs The Millbrooker who has, as always, judged my tastes to perfection. I know these things aren't everyone's cup of Keemun, but they certainly float my boat to use the modern parlance (see how down-with-the-kids I am? So cool, daddy-o).