Christmas is coming!

The Christmas decorations are going up and so the big day  must be close.
I bought this cross stitch wall hanging as a kit in Lund, Sweden many years ago. Mistress Talpa put it together with her usual skill. The text translates as:
Now a thousand Christmas lights are lit on the dark round of the earth

Now for the identity of yesterday's puzzle object. It was a fragment of a Roman tubi fittili  or vaulting tube made from clay baked in the sun.

Vaulting tubes (tubi fittili) are hollow terracotta tubes which were employed in Roman architecture to construct a lightweight framework for a vault, an arched structure which formed the ceiling of a room. Vaulting tubes were used primarily between the 2nd and 7th centuries C.E., often in the construction of bathhouses and major churches throughout the Roman Empire. They are found predominantly in North Africa, though examples have also been found in Sicily, Italy, Spain and Britain, as well as in shipwrecks throughout the Mediterranean. I picked up this fragment in Tunisia.