jl999 gaming A Christmas Gnome Tradition, More Than 1,000 Strong

Updated:2025-01-06 05:30    Views:103

First, advent calendars; then gnomes; then the tree; and then Christmas itself. Only as an adult did I discover that one element in this sequence separated us from other New York families. In my early childhood, my motherjl999 gaming, awakened to a novel festive touch by a Swiss friend with Swedish tastes, had collected more than a hundred little hand-carved wooden figures — Scandinavian gnomes, dressed in red, mostly with cotton-wool hair.

She grouped them so that they seemed to be in the middle of busy lives: old gnomes who might have been married grandparents rocked in neighboring chairs; young ones were posed as if courting; a band placed in the front hall boasted musical instruments.

For three weeks a year, they peeked out from behind books in the library, winked from the windowsills, leaned casually atop a stack of sheet music on the piano. The ones on sleds congregated on the side table in the dining room, which had a surface of snow-like white marble, and the ones lugging sacks occupied the living room coffee table, as though trudging down from the North Pole. The population increased every year, and so did the collective narrative of the setups.

Credit...Ryan Lowry for The New York Times

A few years after my mother died in 1991, my brother and I divided up whatever my father did not want to keep. My brother and his wife got most of the jewelry and my husband and I landed the gnomes. Every year in early December, I position them around the house, trying to recreate the spirit of my mother’s tableaux.

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The effect could be potent, scientists say. Rivers contain carbon dioxide that is constantly escaping into the air, where it traps heat and warms the planet. But adding limestone converts some of that carbon dioxide into a stable molecule that instead stays underwater and washes into the sea, where it should remain trapped for thousands of years.

Until this year, only humans, dolphins and parrots were known to use names when communicating. In June, however, scientists reported that African elephants appeared to use names, too; researchers made the discovery by using artificial intelligence-powered software to detect subtle patterns in the elephants’ low-pitched rumbles.

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