And this is your annual closure notice of the blog 🙂

Hope you all have a merry Christmas for those who celebrate (and a happy Chanukah, Kwanzaa and other traditions around this time of year I am surely forgetting). I’ll be back after the New Year, with plenty of good resolutions…

And here’s your traditional Virgin Mary, Vietnamese-style:

Đức Mẹ La Vang, aka Our Lady of La Vang, a major Vietnamese Virgin (you’ll find a lot of overseas parishes are called after her. La Vang’s somewhere in the centre of Việt Nam, and it’s a huge pilgrimage centre).

Sorry, I couldn’t find a larger image, but here are two bonus ones of other Vietnamese Virgin Maries, courtesy of the H:
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Well, it’s traditional by now…
Blog going dark for a few days.

Hope you all have a fantastic Christmas for those who celebrate it, and see you next year!

(yes, Japanese Virgin Mary. Not exactly representative of the majority belief system in Japan, but isn’t she awesomely pretty?)

So, Christmas is starting to loom large, and I have very nearly finished my gift-shopping (well, except for the cards, and the tree which are still MIA. At least we got the nativity scene). Going to be very dark here, as I’m leaving for Brittany on the morning of the 24th, and not coming back until the 30th. There will be internet in a very limited fashion. Hopefully, writing will happen, in a less limited fashion.

Meanwhile, I hope you all have a fabulous Christmas, and a very happy New Year’s Eve.

(yup, it’s a Chinese Catholic icon. I thought it looked awesome)