For Weekly Prompts Photo Challenge, the theme this week is Advent weather.

November here in Chicagoland was unseasonably cold – in fact, our first and only major snowfall was just after Thanksgiving! Since then, we haven’t had more than a dusting or flurries. We are never guaranteed a white Christmas and this year it looks as though there will be no snow for Christmas. The only evidence of snow we have now is ugly mounds of plowed, piled up snow here and there, often covered with a clump of leaves! It’s surprising that it hasn’t all melted yet, considering that we’ve had at least a week of warmer than normal days with temperatures rising occasionally to the upper 40s! The weatherman says that the average for mid-December is about 33ºF.

About a week ago, I was walking to church on a Sunday morning at about 8:30 a.m. and I was struck by the delicate layer of frost coating the grass and leaves, paralyzing them in a frozen state until the sun could shine on them to warm them up. I thought the effect was quite pretty.


This morning I noticed this naked tree, its bottom branches adorned with bright red balls for the Christmas season, while near the top sits an exposed abandoned bird’s nest.

(I wonder if there were more balls near the top that got blown off, or was the decorator not tall enough to reach them all?)