A pleasure that Erica and I share is Chicago's Christkindlmarket, a German-style open air food and gift market. There's something so cheery about a warm pork sandwich and even warmer mulled wine, standing outside in the cold of a Chicago winter. Usually we get downtown sometime in December, grab some food, glance at the stalls with German trinkets and Guatemalan and scarves, and head out. This year, we were about to leave when an ornament on the outside of one of the bigger stalls caught our eyes: a witch holding a cat (or seal—there's some debate in the Gerdes house).
We ended up inside the massive Frank's Ornament House and were overwhelmed by the variety of ornaments available. There were delicate, completely traditionally crafted glass ornaments of every interest a person might have. We went, in current Gerdes parlance, hog-wild.
