Holiday Countdown Week 4 ~ Fire

We like to squeeze in a few fun, noncommercial, vaguely pagan celebrations where we can in the holiday season, and fire is always a hit with boys. First, before we could make new wreaths, we had to immolate last year's wreaths and release the wire forms. Wreath-burning is always fun, because you can twirl them around on a stick, and it's a tradition we used to do on spring equinox or summer solstice, but never got around to it this year (in fact never got around to taking the dried brown wreaths down off the house).

Another fiery celebration for us is Solstice, when we traditionally hike down to the river and have a small fire. This year we observed Solstice one day late, mainly because we were all too darn tired on Saturday night. It was a good choice--the night was mild and windless, and we were able to comfortably sit around the fire for a good long while, just chatting and enjoying a quiet, stress-free evening, with nothing to do except try to keep kids from setting themselves and each other on fire.

Which isn't any easier at 14 and 18 than it is when they're three.

The Holiday Squeeze

I had to make some adjustments as I figured out—or relearned—how to Christmas while working full time.



We had the added complication this year of M's weekend work and play practice schedule.



Plus the plays and music concerts and other performances to attend ourselves.



We worked around, cut back, and made-do. I let some things drop—St. Nicholas Day, St. Lucia Day, the Winter Solstice hike and fire in the woods.



No one seemed to miss the missing celebrations, and I'm not sure how to take that—be happy that my kids are easy to please or disappointed that our traditions over the years didn't make more of an impression.



We DID host our traditional Hanukkah feast with friends, on the same afternoon we brought in our tree.



C and the boys took charge of decorating said tree, while I prepared latkes, and festooned it with miles of yarn garland from E and Z's finger-knitting days.



It took me until two days before Christmas to finish hanging all our ornaments, the same day I spun like a whirlwind, baking three kinds of cookies and my first-ever yule log cake (Black Forest flavor).



And we went on a traditional family Christmas Eve hike to the river with our guests.



Followed by family and feasting and, of course, round after round of gift-opening.



The greatest gift I received was five full days off to spend doing all of that baking and decorating, and a little last-minute shopping, and, of course, doing what I love best on Christmas: hanging out at home with my kids, watching them enjoy their gifts, nibbling all day on cookies and crackers and cheese, and just being for a little while, with nowhere to go and absolutely nothing we have to do.

I hope you and yours had a wonderful holiday season, too.

On the Solstice

I had an infuriating day grappling (unsuccessfully) with an impenetrable government bureaucracy (an intolerance for bureaucracy is one of the many reasons I no longer work for the government) and Christmas shopping for about the 100th time this holiday season, thinking I was done, finally, before realizing I'd forgotten gifts for two people. I went into the evening tense and grouchy.



While I made soup, I put E and Z to work stringing popcorn. They've reached the stage where they can pop the corn with only a little guidance, thread their own needles and knot their own threads. One of the advantages of repeating the same rituals year after year. After many years of making failed birdseed ornaments, I gave in this year and bought a bird seed bell instead, and after dinner we hung that and the popcorn in the spruce tree in front of our house and then trekked through the woods, down to the river.



I don't get outside at night at winter much—except when driving to and from places—because, I admit it, I don't like being cold. But it was a beautiful night—cold, yes, but still and starry, with the snow giving off enough light you almost didn't need a flashlight (which is a good thing because my headlamp battery died on the way there).

Down at the river, we lit a small fire (more of a b- fire than a bon-fire), toasted marshmallows, made s'mores, finally burned the sparklers that have been sitting on a high shelf since I-don't-know-when. We sat in the snow and watched as the fire burned down to coals and then trekked our way home, feeling a little lighter as we entered into winter.

Weekend Things ~ Wonderful Life, Bird Count, Hanukkah

We had one of those weekends where everything was happening at once.

M played Bert the Cop in It's a Wonderful Life. I was able to catch two of the four performances, and they were great (don't you love high school plays?). Here he is with George and Ernie, checking out Violet's backside as she struts away across the stage:



Saturday, C and I and E and Z did the Christmas Bird Count. This is the third year in a row and the fourth year overall that we've had the same route in our area. The first time was many years BC (before children), and we both swear we saw snow buntings that year, but we haven't seen them since.

If you want to tag along in spirit, you can watch the video C made of our count:

Sunday, I helped out M's French trip with a bottle drive (lucky kid was at work and didn't have to help me) and then took him Christmas shopping after he got out of work. In the evening, friends came over for our traditional Hanukkah dinner of latkes, gingered beets, and homemade apple sauce. Per tradition, C made a Yule Log Menorah. I think this is the best one yet. Usually the menorah-yule-log gets tossed in the wood stove, but this year C threatened to hide this one and just pretend he made it new next year. I'm okay with that.

They didn't have gelt at the store where I usually buy it, so the kids made do with square chocolates in shiny wrappers. The change of shape didn't seem to slow down their dreidel playing (or chocolate eating) at all, and when the chocolates were gone, they played with nuts.



To infuse an educational element into our festivities, we watched The Rugrats Chanukkah special. It was silly but surprisingly informative and the big kids didn't complain about watching a cartoon.

Best of the Blog ~ Holiday Traditions

Traditions give a comforting sense of rhythm and repetition to days and years. They give us things to look forward to, trigger memories, and are measuring sticks by which we chart our family's changes over the years. They can also be repetitive, rote, and boring. Do we have to do that again? I'm feeling a bit of the latter this year, which either means it's time for these kids to grow up and move out already, or it's time to mix things up and try something new. Before I figure out what that will be, here's a little stroll down some of our favorite holiday traditions.

Christmas Book Countdown

With much bigger boys, this will be the first December in many years that we don't count down the days to Christmas by unwrapping and reading a holiday book (or two or three) each evening before bed. But for all the years it lasted, the Christmas Book Countdown was one of our favorite traditions. (This post tells gives the low-down on the tradition and also includes links to the creation of the book crate and some of our seasonal favorite reads).

Getting the Tree

Setting off into the woods to search for and cut the perfect tree is one of my favorite parts of the holiday. We've gotten a tree out of the woods near our house every year since M was a baby and I've been documenting those tree hunts here since 2009. That year, I shared some history on that tradition.  Some years we collected our tree from snowless woods. Then there was the year we came home from picking out a tree from the woods and decided to instead use the tree that had fallen down in our front yard months earlier. Some years, we've had to squeeze getting the tree in between all the other things we have going on; make that many years. And last year, the year we got our 16th tree off this land, I revisited some of those past tree-gettings.

Christmas Cookies

Making—and eating—cookies is, of course, a favorite tradition of everyone around here. I've honed cookie-making to a science, mixing all the dough in one mega-mixing session, and putting it in the fridge or freezer for later cutting. This saves me from having to wash all of the measuring and mixing implements more than once. To avoid contamination, I start with the white dough of sugar cookies, followed by light brown Spekulatius, and finish with the much darker chocolate gingerbread. Sometimes I add other cookies into the mix, like two kinds of shortbread I tried last year. Different candies make appearances now and then, including the perennial and always improving peppermint bark,

Little Holidays
My favorite part of the Christmas season is not Christmas at all, but the other holidays we celebrate in a small way in the weeks leading up. These are low-stress, high reward events, completely divorced from wantiness, greed, and unrealistic expectations.

On December 6, we celebrate St. Nikolaus Day, with a few treats placed in shoes left out the night before: an ornament for the tree, a chocolate, and a clementine. On or around December 13, we celebrate St. Lucia Day with saffron buns.

Sometime during the eight days of Hanukkah, we get together with friends for latkes, applesauce, a few rounds of dreidel, and our traditional Yule log menorah. A few days ago, M said "Did you know most Christian families don't celebrate Hanukkah?" It was a funny statement, but also a perfectly reasonable thing to be surprised by for a kid growing up in an atheist-but-open-minded-and-slightly-pagan household. We don't mind coopting religious celebrations that aren't our own, especially if they involve really good food. And I'd rather have a latke with sour cream than turkey or ham (or whatever the traditional American Christmas dinner is these days) any day.

For the solstice, we decorate our front yard spruce tree with yummy treats for the birds and, weather permitting, go out for a nighttime trek to the river, where we build a small fire and enjoy being outside at night in winter—a rare event.

Twelve Days of Christmas

Several years ago, I started combatting the day-after-Christmas letdown by keeping the festivities going for twelve more days. Our celebrations are simple: A Twelve Days of Christmas calendar (kind of the anti-Advent calendar); a ring of twelve candles which we light each night while we sing a holiday carol or two, removing one candle each night as we count down to twelve; and one final gift dropped in shoes placed by the fire on the last night of Christmas.

After all that celebrating (not to mention actual Christmas, which involves a lot of contortions with C's extended family plus long-distance Christmasing with my family in Colorado), we are usually ready to settle into a long, quiet winter.

These Guys

Turn 12 today!!!



We already started celebrating over the weekend, as is our custom, with a movie and bowling with their BFF and an old-fashioned red velvet cake.

It's been a wild ride, twelve years of mothering TWINS. So what can I say about these guys on the big One-Two?

Z: Climber of trees and walls. Cartwheeler, flipper, rural parkour-er. Lover of Norway. Baker of scones. Eater of all things sour. Duck-tender.

E: Lover of cats. Reader and mine-crafter. Sayer of the funniest words and sentences. Baker of banana-chocolate-chip muffins. Rider of bike. Watcher of You-Tube.

We have more celebrating to do this afternoon—a hike, dinner at their favorite spot, and presents.

Belated Valentines

C is somewhat…uneven…in his gift-giving. Sometimes he completely knocks it out of the park, getting me something that is a total surprise, but exactly what I want and need at that given time (The Birthday of the Laptop comes time mind), and then there are…the other times (The Christmas of the Mop will forever live in infamy). Valentine's Day is not one of his strong points, and to be honest, I don't really care about it, that much.

So this year, I wasn't very surprised, and really not all that put out when he came home of Valentine's Day and, seeing the heart-shaped chocolate cake I had just pulled out of the oven, started squirming and mumbling in this certain way he has.

"Why are you whining?" I said.

"Because I forgot Valentine's Day," he said.

Which wasn't entirely true, since we'd gone out on a Valentine's date Saturday night—to a murder mystery dinner theater—and even though it had been my idea, and I'd had to prod him to get the tickets, he did pay for the tickets, and he did drive there and back, an hour each way, in a snowstorm. And I hadn't really done much for Valentine's Day—a nice, romantic dinner for five, a heart-shaped cake, a bit of chocolate for everyone, and a card, about which there's much disagreement as to whether it looks like a heart or not.

So I wasn't even all that mad. Mildly miffed you might say. And the next day, C came home with a card, a bit of chocolate, and actual flowers from the store (which I'm pretty sure he's never done before).

As I was tucking him in bed, E also gave me a belated valentine: this drawing he made of a cat couple.



And, as it turns out, the Valentine cards I sent out were all belated as well—even though I'd ordered them very early, I didn't get them in the mail before the blizzard (I'd had a vague thought that I might pick up some pretty stamps), and they didn't even get picked up from our mailbox until Valentine's Day. So we'll chalk this year up as the Year of the Belated Valentine, because really, isn't any day a good day to show someone you care?

Solstice Night

"Tomorrow's the solstice," I say.

"Does that mean we get to burn something?" M says.

"Tomorrow's the first day of winter," I say later.

"Does that mean we get to burn something?" C says. Pyromania runs in families.

I planned to finish some Christmas projects, but inspiration struck and I spend most of the day writing—what I'm supposed to be doing with my days. E and Z get home and I mix up some frosting so they can ice the few remaining sugar cookies that have not been devoured by people who don't get the concept of Christmas cookies. I then hide them and the other types in the freezer. I pick up M from his bus stop so he doesn't have to walk home with his guitar. I walk out to the field to take a picture of the sunset. I make baked macaroni and cheese and put it in the oven just as C gets home and we all troop through the woods in the dark to the river. I realize how much more humane it is, not to always be rushing home from work at five or six at night and trying to squeeze a full life in around the margins.

We build a fire and bask in the relative warmth—34 degrees after several days below zero. It's a simple affair—no picnic,  no thermos of hot chocolate, no script. Just family and light and warmth in the dark. We hear an owl make a sound—not a hoot, but an otherworldly gurgle and trill—and another answer it from across the river. We hear the heaving and cracking of ice and the faint trickle of water beneath the ice. We pile snow on the coals and head home to hot, bubbling macaroni and cheese.

The longest night, the shortest day, are done. The earth will begin its slow turn back toward heat and light. In the time before astronomy, it was not always assured that it would turn back, that winter wouldn't set in to stay. Even today it can sometimes feel that way. But rest assured, friends, light follows darkness. This one may be colder and darker and longer than we've experienced in a long while, but spring will come.

Not-Quite-Perfect Peppermint Bark

For a few years now, I've been working on perfecting my peppermint bark recipe, with the twinned goals of deliciousness and minimal labor. I thought I had the formula just right this time:

• 2 bars Green & Black's white chocolate
• 2 bars Green & Black's mint chocolate 
• small package Annie's chocolate bunny grahams
• a couple of scoops of tiny peppermint candies from the candy store

Unfortunately, I ran into a couple of problems when assembling my ingredients:

• The grocery store did not have G&B's white chocolate, so I had to buy the much more expensive bars at the health food store.
• I accidentally bought dark chocolate rather than mint chocolate
• I couldn't find chocolate bunny grahams anywhere and had to settle for Newman's Own chocolate alphabet cookies, which contain palm oil and left me feeling guilty about the rain forests
• the peppermint candies from the candy store were not as tiny as I had remembered

Undeterred by these setbacks, I forged ahead. My first time-saving plan was to break up the first bar of white chocolate and melt it on the pan in the oven. I pictured the pieces getting all soft and gooey, and easily spread with a spatula. Unfortunately, they turned brown and crunchy and not at all melty.

Not willing to waste that pricey bar of white chocolate,  I transferred the brown chunks to a hot water bath and added a couple scoops of coconut oil to help smooth out the mixture as it melted.


I then smashed up a couple tablespoons of the not-quite-small-enough-to-use-whole peppermint candies and added them to the white chocolate to help disguise the brown color, and spread it all on a sheet of parchment and placed the pan outside in the cold to firm up.

I then placed both chocolate bars in a hot water bath and Z helped me bash up the cookies, right in the bag (with a small hole to let out air) with a hammer. I added several drops of mint flavor to the melted chocolate (a step I could have skipped had I bought the mint bars) as well as the cookie crumbs, spread the whole mixture over the first layer of light brown white chocolate, and placed the tray back outside.

Then I melted the last bar of white chocolate (in a hot water bath, having learned my lesson), added a few more spoonfuls of crushed peppermints, and spread it over the hardened chocolate layer. Over the top, I sprinkled more mint candies, not bothering to smash those up, which I think might have been a mistake, because the final result is a lot for the teeth to handle.

I placed the tray outside one last time for a few minutes and then transferred it to the refrigerator while we all went to go see Fantastic Beasts. When we got home, I broke the bark into hunks and squirreled it away for holiday season munching.

And the best part about the bark being not-quite-perfect? We'll have to eat it all ourselves, in the privacy of our home, where no one else can see the brown layer, or break a tooth on the over-large peppermint bits, or notice how the chocolate cookies end up a little more soggy and less crunchy than the bunny grahams would have.

Getting Our 16th Tree

As we prepared to go out and get our tree Saturday, it occurred to me that this will be our 16th tree that we've gathered off this land—the first one being when M was just a baby and our house was just a shell covered in silvery house wrap. So of course I had to go in search of photos from Christmas Trees Past—these are from 2006:

Our tree-getting ritual has looked pretty similar all of these years—only the babies get bigger and bigger, and move from slings to backpacks to sleds to their own sturdy feet. 

This year they trouped ahead, in search of their own vision of the perfect tree, each of them casting their vote for a hemlock here, a spruce there.

As always, however, we keep up the search until the perfect balsam fir appears.

And then another and another.

We argue the merits of each, until our toes get cold and we get thirsty for hot cider.

They're taller now—the boys and the trees—and we pick one that towers over us a bit, cutting it down and then trimming it to the top seven or eight feet. 

This makes for a sturdier trunk, than the old saplings we used to bring home, and often (though not always) denser branches.

This year we aimed for a tree whose angled upward, hoping that, laden with ornaments, they would end up more horizontal than droopy.

We said our words of thanks to the tree, for bringing light and life into our home this dark and cold wintertime, and E and Z did the honors, sawing it down and then cutting it to length and clipping away extraneous branches.

We take the tree home and set it up in the space we've cleared and cleaned in anticipation. And then we put on Christmas records and decorate, a process that everyone loses enthusiasm for far too soon.

This year's tree is big and sturdy enough that it holds every single one of our numerous ornaments, including the "normal" ornaments that E specially requested—a box of gold glass balls that I bought at Kmart, back when C and I didn't have enough ornaments to fill out a small tree, as hard to believe that there ever was such a time. 

Finally we place the elf in his place of honor, at the top, hugging the glass star, ready to preside over our festivities of the season.