Igloo Village

I have had SO MUCH FUN over the past couple of days, hanging out with my friends here, and meeting ALL SORTS of new people that I didn't even know worked at the North Pole! SO, let's see...where to begin...well, I had a rather disturbing experience on Sunday, involving the robot that answers the Miley Cyrus letters, out in the bunker -- I'll tell you about that later -- but on my way back to the Library I ran into a couple of friends who convinced me to join them (and a whole bunch of other people) in building the annual Igloo Village.
It works like this: people get together in groups and build their own igloos, and then they build enclosed pathways between their igloos and other people's igloos, and the end result is an interconnected village under the snow and ice. There are tunnels from the Kitchens (the Main Kitchen provides warm beverages and clean-up services for all the used dishes, but the various Break Room Kitchens are the source of any meals and snacks one might want.) You can order pretty much anything you can dream up from any department's kitchen and it will arrive within about 20 minutes. There are exceptions to that delivery time, though, if something takes a long time to prepare. Two guys I was hanging out with in a friend's igloo (playing Parcheesi with wrapped candies as the game pieces -- when you capture someone's piece you're allowed to eat it) decided to ask Old World Celebrations and Orthodox Christmas to collaborate on the catering for their "let's pretend it's 1620" meal, and that meal took about 3 hours to arrive, at which point I was already on my way back down the hallway. (We'd had plenty of snacks in the mean time.)

I had so much fun BUILDING the igloo, though. We placed a ladder of protruding blocks up one side of our igloo, and took turns climbing up to seal the seams in the ice with hot water, and then sliding back down. I had begun to think I wouldn't need the snowsuit I'd packed to come up here (because it's so warm in Santa's Library, and I had been too busy for any side excursions in the snow), but I certainly got some good use out of it doing THAT. Plus my friends let me light the candles they'd placed in sconces all along the tunnel hallways, which is an honor, traditionally. It was fun. It's totally dark and cold in there, but when you find a candle and light it, it illuminates another patch of the hallway. And even when you're in a really long hallway, wondering how many more candles there could possibly be until the end, it's nice to know that there will definitely be someone at the end. Of course, sometimes you don't know whom you'll find....