A Weekend in Williamsburg: Wreaths

And I've finally found time to post my last set of photos from our Thanksgiving weekend!  There are only a few of them, and they're all wreaths used to decorate various buildings around the colonial section of town.  

While we were there, we heard that back when the whole Colonial Williamsburg foundation was first starting up, they only owned a handful of buildings, and all the rest were privately owned.  Some of the owners weren't real keen on adhering to the spirit of the Colonial era and wanted to put up modern Christmas decorations.  Someone very smart came up with the idea of having a contest to see who could display the best wreath using only natural materials found back in that era, and soon all the houses were decorating with lovely, old-fashioned wreaths and greenery.  Even though now only one of the houses in that part of town is privately owned, they still keep up the tradition of displaying interesting wreaths.  

So anyway, I'll begin with the wreath on the door of the court house and jail, which is decorated with pomegranates:

And here are a few one some of the private residences.  Although the Williamsburg Foundation owns these houses, many of them are the homes of people who work for the foundation.  And they're reportedly Very Expensive to rent, as you might imagine.

This is a wreath on one of the houses you can rent for just a night or two and stay in to get a taste of colonial furnishings and so on:

I thought this wreath from inside Shield's Tavern was cool, with its rope-wrapped upper half and then... are those artichokes in amongst the flowers and greenery?

Check out how the wreath outside Chowning's Tavern uses oyster and scallop shells, with sponges to look like foam coming out of tin beer mugs:

And this is the hat outside the Mary Dickinson shop, where we bought the girls hats:

Finally, they had the lamp posts decorated too, as you can see here:

 Although I find the wreaths beautiful, I think I prefer the greenery garlands like above the doors and windows of the Cheese Shop.  I'm trying to figure out a way to get this look to work by our front door now.