And this is your annual closure notice of the blog 🙂

Hope you all have a merry Christmas for those who celebrate (and a happy Chanukah, Kwanzaa and other traditions around this time of year I am surely forgetting). I’ll be back after the New Year, with plenty of good resolutions…

And here’s your traditional Virgin Mary, Vietnamese-style:

Đức Mẹ La Vang, aka Our Lady of La Vang, a major Vietnamese Virgin (you’ll find a lot of overseas parishes are called after her. La Vang’s somewhere in the centre of Việt Nam, and it’s a huge pilgrimage centre).

Sorry, I couldn’t find a larger image, but here are two bonus ones of other Vietnamese Virgin Maries, courtesy of the H:

Virgin at Vũng Tào (ex-Cape Saint-Jacques). To give you an idea of how large she is, here is a second picture:

Kind of those huge white Buddha statues that you frequently see in Việt Nam (probably in the rest of Asia, but I haven’t been elsewhere that has a strong Buddhist tradition, sorry), except that she’s the Virgin Mary. The H loves her (I prefer the La Vang Virgin–particularly because of the people receiving the revelation, and because of course Christ wears red, the colour of good fortune…)