Wintery atmosphere for Christmas eve

I didn't know exactly what to upload here or what to blog about as I am waiting for Christmas to arrive. This post is not very original: I blogged about similar subjects here and here. This picture by Larry Elmore is called Winter campaign. I have no idea what the context is, but judging by the clothes and weapons of the characters here I think they are meant to be Eastern European (or akin to them). In any cayse, it reminds me slightly of our own Dungeons & Dragons campaign: the characters travelling in the snow on horses, the raven/crow/corvid looming over them ominously (my brother had the raven as the emblematic animal of the big baddies in our D&Dr campaign), I wonder if he is part of the party or spying on them, the giant boar accompanying them... I think they are baddies, thinking about it. I might be wrong. But aside from this, the landscape, the setting and atmosphere here, the sense of dynamism Elmore creates so well, all this reminds me of our D&Dr campaign when we play during Christmastime.

As I said, before, I associate Christmas carols with D&Dr. I have already uploaded a song from Jessye Norman's Christmastide here. I have already put McKennit's version of O Come O Come Emmanuel. But as I mentioned before, I associate the interpretation of Jessye Norman with those moments when our characters travel in the snowy landscape, leaving their inn of their castle early in the morning, mounting their horses for a long journey. And now Christmas is coming, almost here, so this carol is fitting to all states of mind.