It's Christmas Eve, and all of us here at Sakeriver (me, that is) wish you all a safe, healthy, and happy holiday. And to say thanks for following along all this time, here's a cookie, decorated by Jason's friend L.

Technical info: Shot with a Nikon D40, Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 DX lens, and Vivitar DF-383 flash (in Gary Fong Lightsphere). Manual exposure mode, manual flash mode. Aperture f/4, shutter 1/30 sec, ISO 200, flash power 1/4 (I think). Post-processing in Aperture 3: curves to brighten highlights and midtones; levels to darken shadows and brighten midtones.

Thoughts for improvement: The background is a little cluttered, so this might have been better at f/2.8 or f/1.8 to further defocus the background. I do like the little red and green bokeh highlights in the corner, though. There is also some color fringing due to chromatic aberration, but this is an artifact of my lens/camera combination--if I were more motivated I could try to remove or reduce it in Photoshop.