Christmas in nigh. Lights are twinkling on houses and our tree is already snuggled into our living room. Snow has been falling up north. For those of you who don't live in Texas, November probably feels like a weird time to say goodbye to summer. You tuck your summers away after Labor day and greet autumn's crisp evenings and golden days in September.

In Texas, fall begins in November. You may have heard that we crazy southerners trick-or-treat in flip flops. We do. I spend most of October impatiently wishing for fall and when it comes I am always excited, but I can't help feeling a pang of nostalgia for another Texas summer passed. So here's a salute to this year's radiant Texas summer, filled with gardens growing, waves crashing, cicadas singing, and bees buzzing.

I'm finally sorting through some of my pictures from our trip to Vienna last Christmas and I came upon the set I took outside Schonbrunn Palace and in the surrounding gardens. It was the day after Christmas and beautifully sunny with hardly a cloud in sight. We only had a few days like this, most of our visit was cold and snowy and though there's a beauty to that weather too, there's nothing like a radiantly sunny day in dead winter.

We toured the castle's interior as well but I kept my camera off. I loved seeing the rooms set up as they were in different eras during the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But the crowd control was horrific, honestly, which might have been why the palace grounds were the highlight for me. An elaborate pavilion sits on top of a hill behind the palace, at just the right height to provide a beautiful view of Vienna spread below.

We found our pumpkin late this year. Between rainy weekends and out of town visitors our October weekends were always busy. It was only two days from Halloween when we finally managed to go pumpkining at a local church.

Choices were limited but after much searching through pumpkins in a Goldy Locks fashion, this one too tall, that one too lumpy, we found our pumpkin: squat, round, and ridged with a long gnarled stem. Perfect for us.