Weekend Things ~ Holiday Making

Last week, in response to the sudden realization that Christmas was just two weeks away, I went into a flurry of activity--shopping, ordering, card-sending, gift-wrapping--moving on autopilot, staying up too late every night, drinking more caffein than usual (which isn't hard to do, since I don't drink much). Thursday I purchased the last gift and put a box in the mail, sure to arrive (touch wood) in time. In celebration, I bought some rum to go in the eggnog and looked forward to a weekend of enjoyable holiday preparations--sans credit card.

In the end, it still felt a bit like ticking things off the list--but they were enjoyable, low-pressure things to check off: wreath-making, cookie-baking, solstice-tree-decorating (including the requisite birdseed ornament fails), and last-year's-wreath-burning. These are the kinds of traditions that mean more to me than the endless buying and giving and getting of stuff and are, I hope, what my kids will remember about the holidays long into the future.

Wild Wednesday ~ Conifers

When we were in the woods getting our Christmas tree on Saturday, Z and I collected a few branches for making a wreath. I like to mix up my wreaths with a variety of evergreens, so we gathered a bit of four different species. 

Balsam fir (Abies balsamea) is the traditional Christmas tree species around here. I've always tried to talk C into letting us get a different type of tree, but he insists on balsam, which, I admit, has certain advantages. One is the smell--that classic evergreen fragrance that gives the tree its name ("balsam" comes from the Hebrew for "perfume"). The other is the gentleness of the needles. The way to tell fir trees from spruce (they both have shortish needles that grow individually from the twigs) is that fir needles are "fine, flat, and friendly."

Spruce needles, by contrast are "sharp ands spiny." If you pluck a needle from a twig and can roll it between your fingers, it's a spruce--the needles are triangular in cross-section, unlike flat fir. Spruce needles also grow all around the twig, while fir are arranged pretty much in a single plane. Hanging ornaments on spruce branches would be rather painful. This is a white spruce (Picea glauca).

Eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) needles are flat and grow in roughly one plane, like fir needles, but they are both shorter and more varied in length than fir needles. Hemlock trees also lack the nice conical shape of fir trees, but are rather shaggy, haphazard beasts. It would actually be kind of fun to have one for a Christmas tree, but you'd have to let go of all Christmas tree expectations.

Eastern white pine (Pinus strobes) looks a bit like Charlie Brown's tree, with long, feathery needles. The way you can tell you have a pine tree is that the needles grow in bundles, rather than individually from the twig, like other species of conifer (with the exception of tamarack, or larch, Larix laricina, whose needles also grow in bundles, but they have a distinctly fire-work-shaped growth pattern, and they wouldn't have needles this time of year, because they shed theirs in the fall). White pine needles grow in bundles of five, which you can remember either because there are five letters in "white" or because there are five points on a W.

Pines wouldn't be ideal Christmas trees because they are very sappy--you ornaments and presents would get covered in pitch. It turns out that, as much as I hate to admit it, balsam fir is the best Christmas tree around here. The others we can enjoy our in the woods--and in the wreath Z and I will make this weekend.

Weekend Things ~ Christmukkah

First: More pictures of my new kitchen shelves. I was finally home when the lovely afternoon light was shining on them this weekend and I had to take more pictures. What can I say? I'm in love.

(And I'm extra in love with this totally adorable little strawberry pitcher.)

Okay, onto the weekend. We had a very busy Christmas activity-filled weekend, starting with a performance of Annie at M's high school Friday night and wrapping up with The Nutcracker Sunday afternoon. In-between we got our Christmas tree.

At around 55 degrees F, it was very much not Christmas-tree-getting weather. We've had a few snowless tree-getting expeditions, but never one so warm as this.

I found myself wandering around, taking pictures,

And forgetting what our mission was.

But C kept us on track and found us this nice little tree.

We said our traditional words of thanks, sang "O Christmas Tree," and the boys took turns sawing through the trunk.

When we got home, C and I partially decorated it while the boys played outside for hours--such a treat this time of year. Then we set aside the Christmas decorating and prepared latkes and gingered beets and fresh, hot applesauce for a Hanukkah dinner with friends. We started celebrating Hanukkah a few years ago because I wanted to introduce my kids to different cultures (and because latkes), and it's turned into one of my favorite events of the season--an evening spent with good friends around good food with absolutely no expectations, no giving or getting of gifts, no baggage of Christmas past. No need to worry that the tree is half-decorated, the cookie dough is half-mixed in the fridge, the presents are 1/4 purchased and 0% wrapped. C made our traditional Yule log menorah (this year he found a great branch with a natural hump in the middle), we spun some dreidel, ate some gelt, listened to klezmer music and Adam Sandler, and just generally enjoyed ourselves.

The next morning I snuck out of bed early and put some saffron buns in the oven for St. Lucia Day and we finished decorating the tree.

It's a spindly guy, I suppose, compared to farm-raised trees.

But we managed to fit most of our ornaments onto it, even some glass balls that I don't usually bother with.

House Projects

A side benefit of moving the ducks to the garage is that we had to run electricity, which has allowed C to set up and run his power tools out there. Ever since, he's kept busy with little house projects. First, I had him build some cubbies for our mudroom--to replace a big dresser that had lots of problems, not the least of which was that everyone was too lazy to open drawers to put away their hats and mittens.

I had found a set of chicken-coop-style cubbies online, gave C a design based on the size of our space, and he proceeded to modify it to work with materials he already had on hand. The final product didn't turn out exactly how I had envisioned it, but it works great. I see it as a metaphor for marriage--two people come together with their dreams and plans and then work with the tools and materials they have to make a rough approximation of the other's vision. Seldom does the result turn out to be an exact match, but with luck it is functional and pleasing to the eye. In the case of the cubbies, they make the mudroom feel much more open and spacious (compared to a large, dark bureau) and they make mitten and hat access much easier. (I didn't take a before picture, but here's our mud room after its last major tidy-up).

Next he build little shelves to go beneath our kitchen cabinets.

These were part of the original plan for our kitchen, but not being super high on the priority list, they never go built.

I couldn't be more pleased with them. They appear to both raise up the space between the counters and bottom of the cabinets and make the counters bigger. And they look so great--every time I look in the kitchen I feel like I'm looking at a picture in a magazine (if I ignore the compost bowl and drying plastic bags and dishes waiting to get loaded in the dishwasher).

Z arranged the teacups and saucers on this span of shelving. He was very adamant that practical things (the cups and saucers we occasionally use, versus the antique saucers and pitchers we just look at) have prime positioning. Again, no before pictures, but you can see the kitchen as it was here.

I used Real Milk Paint, which I love to work with, on both the cubbies (marigold) and the headboard behind the shelves (tavern green), with a clear acrylic coating for water resistance. 

Wild Wednesday ~ Trek

Last weekend, on our way to taking Christmas card photos, the boys and I went on a trek in the woods.

We discovered lots of interesting wild things: birds nests,Woodpecker holes,

Fungus,

And a giant water bug.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the boys have been building forts in the woods...I had begun to despair of their ever going out exploring on their own.

What We've Been Up To

It's been a few weeks since I've been in this space because my computer was threatening to never start up again if I didn't deal with its storage issues. I found lots of ways of avoiding doing so until this past weekend when I finally took every free minute to edit and upload photos online and then copy them to a memory stick and then delete them (which is a scary thing to do, even when you have two backups). I managed to only get through about four months' worth (of 2012!!), but it was enough to free up some space. My plan is to do a month or two ever week until I catch up to now. Of course, catching up with photo management has been on my new year's resolution list for the last three years at least, so we'll see how far I get.

In the meantime, we've been doing our best to get into the holiday spirit. On Thanksgiving, we had our traditional fruit parfait breakfast.



And then Z, M, and I made some corn husk dolls for our table. 

And I made a pear frangipane tart from this cookbook. Oh, my goodness, I don't do a lot of fancy cooking these days, but this was divine and so worth the effort.

The day after Thanksgiving, Z, E, and I drew self portraits. I took a few drawing classes last month and this was one of our homework assignments and it was super fun to do with the kids, even though they had no interest in following the steps in the lesson

Or maybe that's what made it fun--their own unique take on it. 

And then, all of a sudden, it was December. Last Monday evening I was sitting on the top step, putting the first Christmas book in a bag for our book advent calendar (aka CBC or Christmas Book Countdown) when Z walked by on his way to bed. He asked if I was putting all of the books in bags that night. "Not tonight; I'm too tired." I said. "I'm just doing the first book." He laughed and I asked, "Do you still want to do it this year?" "Yes! It's a tradition!" I thought maybe they were getting too old to want to hear Christmas picture books, but I guess not, especially not Z, who is particularly attached to traditions and doing things the same way year after year.

We decided to put off getting our Christmas tree one more week--it really wasn't tree-getting weather, C was busy with a project, and I had a workshop to prepare for and teach Sunday. Instead we did the prep work--dusting and decluttering and vacuuming behind furniture so the living room will be all ready for the tree next weekend. We also went out in the woods to take photos for out Christmas cards, which is always a challenge. This is one of the better shots.

St. Nicholas visited our house Sunday morning and placed gnomes, clementines, and chocolates in the boys' shoes.

The gnomes were supposed to be ornaments (I like to give them ornaments on St. Nicholas Day so they hang on the tree all season), but St. Nicholas never got around to attaching hangers to their gnomey hats.And we even squeezed making a batch of cookies in Sunday evening. I mixed the dough when I got home from my workshop and then E, Z, and M took turns cutting and decorating them with colored sugar in between their showers that evening. While we were making the cookies I remembered how when they were little, baking a batch of cookies was an all day event, with pulling out the play tower, and finding aprons, and making sure they took exact turns with the measuring and mixing and cutting. I thought that even though there are things about those cute little ages I miss, there are some nice compensations, like everything doesn't have to be a big production all the time. I put the cut cookies out on the deck to chill and went to work uploading and copying and deleting one last batch of photos.



When I got into bed at about 10:30 I was feeling very satisfied with myself for having accomplished everything I planned that weekend, and then I remembered...the cookies were still on the deck. So some things are easier nowadays with older kids, but sometimes I still have mommy brain.