The Creative Exchange

Today is National Poinsettia Day in the USA. This Christmas flower was introduced in the USA in 1825 by Joel Roberts Poinsett, a United States Minister in Mexico. It is known as Euphorbia Pulcherrima or more commonly known as Poinsettia or Noche Buena (which is what we call the Christmas eve meal!)

Here in the Philippines, this wonderful Christmas plant comes from colder areas like Tagaytay or Baguio and sold in the last quarter of the year to decorate homes for Christmas. It cost roughly PhP250 a pot ($1:P43) and they rarely flower again. . . The Poinsettia images above was taken from my student's house where they bought several pots of it!

And we joined Sharing My Holiday card exchange over at Lisa's CreativeExchange. And I would like to share what we received from Jeanne Stone of Texas USA:

My dog Sweepy got the package. Postman Nany, who know my dogs well because Nany always deliver cards and packages for them, called them to the gate to hand them Jeanne's package and other holiday cards! When I opened Jeanne's package I found something wrapped and tied with a ribbon and which turned out to be 12 glossy photographs taken by Jeanne herself of the beautiful images around her and sewn together to hang around the house for the holidays! Thank you so much Jeanne! This is really so special! What awesome images!

This is a perfect gift because every year I display all the cards we received (er, what the dogs received) and visitors love to browse around this display and read all the cute and special cards sent from around the world! We also send our holiday cards to all our friends by eMail so expect to receive ours soon!

Now here's the side story to Jeanne's package: a staff from the post office got Jeanne's package and sent a notice for me to personally pick it up at the post office and so I did. But when I got there, this lady refused to hand me the package because my ID does not say Lui Sumo Sweepy and no amount of explanations could make her surrender it (I asked if I can get the Mayor, Vice Mayor, Village Chief, Community leaders, and other VIPs and authority figures to vouch for us to no avail.) I must mention that my dogs and I have been receiving mails and packages for years!! I decided to gather documents as proof (postdated mails, dog IDs, blog posts with post office employees in it, etc.) Obviously this is a case of a new staff not used to dogs getting mails!

In the end, I located Nany (the postman was always out doing the rounds) and he laughed and claimed the package for us! A happy ending after all. Lesson: Anybody sending anything to my dogs must course it through me.