Sometimes, really.

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 It’s Mid-January.  
I’m starting to get cabin fever.  I know, it’s way too early for that.  I think it’s mostly due to Edie being home sick 2 days last week with yet another bug going around, that I managed to catch as well.
It’s just a mild cold.  But the idea that I’ve got another one after the back to back ones that kept me out between Halloween and Christmas has me cranky.
Also, I’ve now spent the better part of the last 3 weeks in my tiny, dark house with my family.  I love my tiny dark house, I love my family.  But enough. 
Thankfully, the weather was warm this past weekend.  Warm enough I wandered around outside and noticed my hellebore starting to bloom.
 
They aren’t supposed to do this until closer to the end of February.  
I’d love to regal you with tales of my outdoor adventures this weekend, but not long into my soaking up the sun out there Saturday, I had a run-in with nature.  A bird perched itself on a tree branch above me and proceeded to relieve itself, all over my lap.  That was enough nature for me for the day.
I headed back inside, where I was inspired to do some cleaning – not only did I get the Christmas cookie tins and holiday china packed away, I re-organized the upstairs linen closet.  Admittedly, balling up sheets and shoving them in wasn’t working anymore, which is what prompted that bit of organizational madness.
Once I got the house clean, I have to admit, I was sort of looking for an excuse to sit and work on my two big projects – Pat’s sweater and the quilt.  I’d recently realized I’d made major progress over the holiday break where we sat and watched tv almost incessantly when we weren’t hosting friends.
 Several inches worth of progress on the sweater.  It finally is starting to look like something.

Friday night, as I was sitting and ripping out delicate little stitches, I realized I was over halfway done ripping apart the quilt.  More like, 75% done disassembling the back from the front.  That definitely went faster than I thought it was going to.
Both are projects I had pie in sky visions of being done by Pat’s birthday, which is a week from today.  The quilt isn’t going to make it – even if I do get the back fully removed, I still have quite a bit of repairs to make to the top of the quilt. It could be an anniversary gift.  But the sweater?  I think I could make that happen in the next week. The weather forecast for the week looks conducive to sitting and knitting.  And having spent a big chunk of Saturday cleaning, I think I could reasonably pull it off.

Ant Music.

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It has recently come to my attention that I am long past due for some sort of contact-style card, a business card if you will.  Actually, I lie when I say it has recently come to my attention.  I’ve known for some time I need a card of some sort. 

I will spare you the long version of how I have put this off because what I really want to talk about is how I have spent the last 3 days, farting around on my computer, attempting to design this sucker myself.  I have this image in my head of what it needs to look like.  Blame that design background, the one I worked my way through college for, the one that I thoroughly enjoyed until I realized it wanted the same large chunk of time as that my Edie girl demanded.  The one that still pops up in small ways, like, envisioning this new card of mine.  That one.  Throw in my ability to bluff my way out of many a situation where I really can appear to know what I’m talking about, when the reality is, I have no clue.  My father used to always say, if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.  I live by that code.  Well, that and don’t ever let anyone tell me I can’t do something because I’m a girl.  Oh, and don’t throw like a girl.  Which took me probably 35 years and watching my own daughter do it to understand what he meant with that last one.

In talking with various marketing and graphic folks, I heard over and over that I could design this myself.  I bought into my own hype.  I allowed myself to be baffled by my own bullshit.  Hell, my own husband couldn’t quite understand that I had this idea in my head and I was trying my best to not just get it out onto the computer screen, I was trying to figure out HOW to make it happen on my computer screen. 

It seems my photoshop skills are not quite what everyone else seems to think they are.   I’m good at many things, but not at photoshop.

The whole card design involves the image of a mason jar.  As I just so happen to have some lying around, I thought I could take a photo of one, photoshop it and turn it into what I envisioned.  I took a shot and after two days of playing with it, was able to get it somewhere near where I wanted it, although in no way shape or form could I tell you how I got it that way.  But then I realized the tiniest detail was off and since I have that design background, I realized I needed to take some more photos and start over.  And then I was worried that it was going to take me another two days to get it where the last one was, the one with a line that was slightly off that probably no one but me would notice, the one that I had no freaking clue how I got it to look like it ultimately did, but it would keep me up at night knowing I had put my name on something that was slightly off.  Bad design at my own hands combined with incompetence. These are the things that I lose sleep over.

So I snapped this shot today.  Uploaded it.  As I opened it up in photoshop, Adam Ant’s Ant Music just so happened to play on the station I was streaming. 

You might not know this about me, but I freaking LOVE Adam Ant.  I’m a total child of the 80’s and Adam Ant is one of the most unappreciated artists of that era.  Ant Music should have been an anthem.  It’s one of my anthems.

So, I’m sitting there, opening this photo, singing along to Ant Music, which was followed by one of my favorite B-52’s songs, Legal Tender.  By the time they were done, I was done.  The image I had in my head was on my computer screen. Never underestimate the power of good tunes to get the job done. I don’t know if I actually learned something over the last 3 days or it was the music. Talk about singing a happy little working song. Whatever it was, it happened.

I suppose after all that, I should show you the image.  But on it’s own, it’s rather blah.  So you’re not going to see it yet.  I’ve now fallen into the font rabbit hole, whereby I spend way too much time playing with fonts, choosing just the right one.  It’s far less frustrating than where I just was, dealing with the realization that I don’t have the skills everyone thinks I have, which it turns out, I just might have actually. Maybe I should believe the hype.  No, the font rabbit hole is far more comforting on many levels, mostly in that I know I know what I’m doing there.  The bigger debate that I’ve been avoiding for way too long is now in front of me – and that is, exactly what to say about myself other than my name and contact information.  I do so many things, I could cover a business card with words.  How to narrow it down to make it be the sleek thing I imagine?  And in that narrowing, how to make it eloquent?  Because while “Goddess of the Universe” sums it up, it might come across as just a slightly bit pretentious and I’ve heard I should tailor it to what I actually do.  Which is sort of everything, although I keep being told I should focus.  But with opportunities popping up in every avenue, it doesn’t make sense to focus like all the advice I’ve given tells me.  The universe says otherwise and ultimately, it’s the universe I listen to.

It was so much easier two days ago when I could just blame it all on the fact that I couldn’t figure out how to do what I wanted to do on the stupid computer.

This so-called life.

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This holiday season found us introducing Edie to one of the best TV shows ever made about being a teenager – My So-Called Life.  The show tackles some serious issues – drinking, drugs, sex, guns in schools – and admittedly, when Edie came and asked me if we could watch it, she pulled the “Daddy said it was okay” and rather than asking him myself, I assumed that he had done the research to see if it was appropriate.  We all know what assuming does.  Turns out it’s not entirely appropriate for a girl who’s going to be 11 in a few short weeks, but as we cringe our way through certain scenes, we realize, we are not that far away from them being appropriate, so perhaps we should consider it starting the conversation early. 

What I loved about the show when it first ran practically 20 years ago was how realistic it was – that was MY 15 year old self up there – as if someone had access to my experiences & inner thoughts and actually made a tv show about them.  Watching it all these years later, I still think that’s my 15 year old self up there on the screen, but I also had this earth shattering moment where I realized that I’ve gone from being Angela Chase to being Angela Chase’s mother.  On about 10 different levels.

It’s not just that someday in the not-so-distant future, my own daughter is going to be 15 and will no doubt be very much like Angela – I can already see similarities between them.  I could see her identifying with the character, I could see her realizing which of her friends were Sharon & Brian, I could hear her & her father talking about how uptight Angela’s mother Patti was, and I could see Edie already identifying with how she just sometimes doesn’t want to talk to her mother, how her mother could just not at all possibly understand what she’s going through. I know that stage is unavoidable, that it’s part of her development and it’s not personal.  Heck, it’s even one of the running themes in the show how Angela so completely dislikes her mother.

The very first episode has a scene where Angela wants to sleep over her new friend Rayanne’s house – and storms off when her mother says she doesn’t know who this person is, or her parents.  How can she let her sleep over when she doesn’t know these people?

Right there, I realized I had totally forgotten how it drove me absolutely nuts that my parents gave me the third degree about my friends – where did they live, who were their parents, what did their parents do for a living – I remember thinking back then it was some value judgement on the part of my parents, after all what did it matter what someone’s parents did for a living or where they lived?  I’d have to say that at least half the arguments I had with my parents, if not more, were because of all their questions about who I was hanging out with.  About why they always wanted everyone to come over to our house, why wasn’t I allowed to go anywhere?

We all have things that we swear up and down we’ll never say or do as a parent.  Then, as you become a parent, you realize exactly why your parents said those things.  The ‘because I said so’ stuff.  You know what I’m talking about.

Worse than forgetting exactly how much it bothered me was the realization that I do that.  A conversation that keeps coming up among my mom friends, especially since the kids have moved up to the next level of school – 6 neighborhood elementary schools combine into one pseudo-middle school (it’s called an upper elementary, but for all intents and purposes, it’s middle school.) is how exactly to handle your kids being friends with kids who’s parents you don’t know.  How to handle when they are invited somewhere by these kids.  How to explain to your kids without sounding uptight, controlling  and possibly even slightly wacko that it really would be better if we could just host that child and their parents could come pick them up and maybe stop in so we could get to know them. 

Because no matter how old they are, handing them over to a complete stranger, letting them go out there on their own is slightly terrifying.  And wanting to know where their friends live, what their parents do, that starts to fill in a picture – and you need a picture to be able to let go.  I get it now. 

Just today she came home from school and while she greeted me with a smile and a hug, she immediately went looking for Daddy and proceeded to do her homework near him while he was working – and open up to him about her upcoming birthday party and who to invite and not invite and why and who already told her they can’t make it, which throws the entire guest list into chaos.  Things that Daddy probably doesn’t care about and really probably wishes I would take care of and listen to, but no, I’m chopped liver and he’s the one with all the right answers, even if he doesn’t think he has any answers.   I suppose it’s all part of the march from bringing these helpless little creatures home from the hospital looking over your shoulder to see if they really are letting you leave with this thing to sending them out into the world as responsible, productive members of society, which really is what our job as parents is when you get down to it – and they like to help matters along by realizing that indeed, we can’t fix everything, don’t always know the answer and even resenting us a little bit for it.  And there is not a damn thing we can do about it except realize it’s just part of the journey, that we were exactly the same way once and that someday, they really will understand.

How my latest project became way more of a project than I thought it was going to be when I started it.

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When I first met Pat, he had this quilt on his bed.  It was soft, slightly tattered, definitely loved and just the right weight to be used all year long.  That quilt stayed on our bed for some time – I don’t remember exactly when it was deemed a little too shabby to be used everyday anymore, but I do know it was pre-Edie.  I assured Pat it could be fixed, that I could fix it and so I put it in a pile of projects to be worked on and there it sat, for some time.  The quilt would come up now & again and I’d think, fixing that quilt would be a great gift for him.  We have a number of quilts his grandmother made that I blogged about last year (only I’ve just realized that the images are MIA so I’m not linking that post until I figure out where those images are), but as I have realized, this quilt was different, because it was made by his other grandmother.  His maternal grandmother was a beautiful seamstress, quite the quilter and owned a fabric shop at one point. Her quilts are all over our house.  This quilt in question was made by his paternal grandmother, who was not known for her sewing.  She was married to a farmer and I don’t think they had a whole lot to their name to begin with when a tornado came through one spring day in the mid 1990’s,  leaving them with their lives, but not much else.  Pat’s grandfather was never quite the same after that, but I suppose when you are 94 years old and have a house land on you, you’re bound to experience some sort of effect.  
In researching how to repair some of the other quilts around our house, I came to the realization that this quilt needed more than just a few patches and a new binding applied – if I was going to do it right, which I wanted to do, as Pat loved this quilt, not just because it’s one of the few things left from his grandmother, because it was he thought, the perfect sleeping quilt.  And doing it right meant taking the binding off, taking the back off, replacing some quilt parts, the backing and the binding. 
 Surely it couldn’t take that long.  A few hours with a seam ripper and it would all be good, yes?
 I thought I could start it just before Thanksgiving and have it done by Christmas.  His birthday later this month at the latest.  
That was before I got into it and realized that this quilt had been quilted through all the layers – top, batting and back.  Machine quilted, with lots of tiny, tight little stitches.  The quilting rows were about 2-3 finger widths apart, and the quilt fits a full size bed.  That’s a lot of tiny, tight little stitches to pull out. I literally have to take the entire thing apart.
Parts of the quilt are so fragile that I have to very slowly and patiently pull every stitch out as carefully as I can.  I have spent hours on this quilt, I have gotten friends to sit on the opposite end of the quilt and help me, and for about 20 or so man hours spent taking the quilt apart, I have gotten about a quarter to a third dequilted.
I realized as I got into the project that the batting between the layers was disintegrating, leaving a trail of fuzz behind.  I had every intention of surprising Pat with this project, but between the mess it was leaving behind as well as the realization that this project was going to take far longer than I had anticipated had me share with him that I was finally working on his grandmother’s quilt.  So much for the surprise, as well as the idea of it being a Christmas or birthday gift this year. This little project is definitely much bigger than I bargained for.
But the quilt itself?  It is most definitely a scrap quilt.  There are some old flannels that I imagine were shirts of Pat’s grandfather.  There are some sweet children’s fabrics, there are what appear to be upholstery fabrics, seersucker, dressier fabrics, vintage prints and more.  As I slowly work my way up and down the rows, I wonder where each piece of fabric came from and I ponder what scraps I’m going to use to repair the quilt.  
As you can see, it’s very much a patchwork quilt, no real pattern, so I think it gives me some room to include some scraps of our lives in it. I never really knew his grandparents, but as I work on this quilt, as I get to know each and every bit of fabric used, I feel like I’ve gotten to know them just a little bit.  I’m actually glad I’ve waited until now to repair this quilt – had I done it earlier, I wouldn’t have done it right.  This way, it will hopefully be around for many more years.
But first, I need to get the darn thing apart.  

In with the new.

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Another holiday season has come and gone, a new year has been rung in and I’ve managed to survive them relatively unscathed.  You can’t seem to escape the idea that you are supposed to be around family for the holidays – even with the admittance that everyone does not have the picture perfect family scenes that seem to dominate in the songs and images of the season.  For someone like me, who a few years ago realized that my own family was in fact so toxic that it simply wasn’t healthy for me, there are landmines all over the holiday landscape.  This year I came to realization that I do a bit of grieving for my family around the holidays, which is no doubt normal and to be expected and honestly, that realization made it easier for me to accept the time I spent in my own head about it, while also not allowing me to wallow.  In other words, there were moments that were hard, but I managed to name them for what they were and move on.  It felt like progress. After all, isn’t admitting there’s a problem the biggest step in solving it?
The three of us spent the week between Christmas and New Years lounging around the house, eating leftovers and having movie watching marathons.  There was some serious progress made on projects that require me to just sit for a spell, like Pat’s sweater and another project I started with the intent of surprising my husband with for Christmas only to realize it was far more work than I had anticipated. Isn’t that always the case?  
It was all quite lovely and much appreciated, that week where we just slowed down, not always answering the phone or turning on the computer, just lots of sleeping in, hot tea and cocoa, waking up to some sort of winter precipitation every other day.  At one point though, Edie did get a bit bored with us, which then found me apologizing to her that no one was available to play because they were all doing family things with their extended family and that we weren’t seeing extended family, this sitting around and just chilling, this is what our family does after the holiday while everyone else sees their grandparents, aunt, uncles and cousins.  Which of course, was starting to go down that little path in my head where I start to feel sorry for myself, where I wonder if making that break from my own family of origin was really so right for all of us, when that dear sweet child pulled me back off the edge of the cliff, reminding me that we were indeed seeing family this holiday season, because weren’t the Smileys coming for New Years and aren’t they family?
Why yes my dear, they are.  And just like that, I realized yet again how grateful I am for the friends and neighbors that surround us with love, that are in fact, our family in so many ways.  And so we rang in the new year with what we like to call our “Virginia Cousins”.
One of the things I love the most about visiting with the Smileys is cooking with Mollie – there’s no real menu planning for our visits, you just bring what you have on hand and see what happens.  Edie & Abigail still have more definite ideas about what they want to cook together, but watching them cook together?   Such a happy thing. 
Of course, after making their one bowl of guacamole, they were quite content to let us do the rest of the cooking.  This is what my kitchen counter looked like New Years Day early evening.
Which, minus Granny’s crystal champagne glass, is about what any kitchen counter looks like when Mollie and I are together.  Keeping 4 kids, 2 husbands, a dog and ourselves fed is a nonstop process.  It doesn’t hurt that we both love to bake together.  
This is where my stacking baking racks really came in handy.  On the bottom layer are mincemeat tarts, baked in mini-muffin tins, while the top rack is a dairy free cookie Mollie whipped up using chick peas, peanut butter and dark chocolate chips.  Both were delish.  And on a sidenote, I want to add that using southern biscuit flour in your pie crust instead of regular all purpose flour yields the flakiest crust I’ve ever made.  For reals.
And when Mollie finishes tweaking that cookie recipe and sends it along, I’ll share.  Promise.
Their visit was a nice extension of our cozy, lazy week, with the exception of Owen’s constant calling for someone to please play Twister with him, which the girls were quite good about, for the most part.  Then again, it’s hard to say no to someone who would take it upon himself to move all the furniture out of the way and set up the game by himself. Owen is really good at moving tables.
This, with the kids fussing at each other, the baby crying, the dog barking,  the new year rung in with everyone still awake piled in our bed, the husbands deciding to head out to a bar to watch a football game together New Years Day while Mollie and I make breakfast, lunch and then dinner in our PJ’s while sipping champagne from family heirloom glasses that don’t get used nearly enough,  this is the sort of family gathering all those holiday images talk about I think.  Where Owen torments Edie to the verge of tears, to have me comfort her telling her this is what it’s like to have a brother while Abigail pipes in with full agreement to that experience. Where Edie decides to have her own little revenge on the candy cane eating monster known as Owen by rearranging all the candy canes on the Christmas tree just out of his reach, so that he thinks he’s eaten all he can reach by himself.  Where the look on her face when I asked her if she had moved the candy in question was priceless.  If that’s what makes family, well then, that’s exactly what they are.
And nothing sends that fact home more than the only picture that was taken over 3 days where all four kids made it into the shot.
Happy 2013.

Holiday highlights.

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Best Present Ever.
A vintage purple glass chicken candy dish.
And a stocking full of candy to fill it.
I’ve always wanted one of these, but have never said a peep about it. Somehow he knew.  The Kitchen Aid stand mixer (circa Christmas 1995) comes close, but something about finding something vintage, purple and a chicken without any prompting this far into things trumps all other presents ever.  
Did I mention the stocking full of candy to keep it filled for some time to come?
Our first eggs from the girls.

A marathon baking session with Betty.  Okay, more like, I took over Betty’s kitchen and oversaw a marathon baking session that included her chocolate chip cookies, Edie & Soph rolling out sugar cookies while I whipped up 5 pies for Betty’s holiday desserts and cleaned up after everyone wearing my  holiday apron made out of my parent’s former Christmas tablecloth that they received as a wedding present.  It’s got 40-something years of gravy, wine and chocolate cake stains.  It makes me unbelievably happy to wear all those memories while making more. 
An impromptu drop in at the Patience homestead resulting in her sharing one of her mince pies with us that somehow became the property of just Edie – making that not-so-wee-one’s holiday complete.  She’d heard mincemeat pies were traditional holiday fare and knowing I had some mincemeat in the freezer, was lobbying for me to make her a pie.   So, thank you Patience for saving Edie’s Christmas and saving me from making one more pie. She even shared a bite with Pat & I, despite swearing up one side and down the other it was never going to happen.
The best part of the holiday though, may be the days after Christmas, the ones where we sleep gloriously late, stay in our pj’s most of the day and eat our way through the leftovers I spent days cooking in anticipation of hanging up my apron for a few days.  Yes, that is definitely the highlight of my holiday, the complete and utter lack of obligations to anyone and anything other lazing around the house with my two very favorite people in the entire world.
 

4 days and counting….

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It’s the Friday before Christmas and in the midst of today’s pre-Christmas meltdown, I didn’t realize I was running out to do last minute errands at lunchtime.  Oh boy.  If I wasn’t heading upstairs to sew one last quick gift, I’d be popping open a bottle of something.

I got some serious Christmas baking on last night, knocking a few items off the to-do list like sugar cookie dough to be baked sometime between now & then in Betty’s kitchen for Santa Claus, Christmas biscotti (cranberry & pistachio) for Pat,  chocolate pretzels for Edie and Rachel’s pumpkin granola.

I’m not completely done yet – there still is no menu for Christmas dinner beyond Edie’s requested brussels sprouts and a yule log for dessert this year. Greens and chocolate cake sound pretty complete to me though.  Nothing is wrapped, but I don’t like to wrap early anyway.  Gives you something to do while you drink Christmas Eve.  And just today I finally got the last of the necessary ingredients to make Grandma’s Fruitcake Cookies, which are a holiday standard.  I know you’re wrinkling your nose at the idea of them and let me tell you – they are awesome.  Graham crackers crumbs, dates, pecans, coconut, maraschino cherries, a can of Eagle brand milk, squish together in mini muffin tins and bake at 350 for 20 minutes.  They are the bomb.

Edie still claims to believe in Santa this year, very likely the last year this will happen.  The older neighborhood boys have been cornered and told to not ruin this for her, as they will not get any treats from my kitchen ever again.  She’s heard kids at school talking and told me she still believed in Santa because she knew there was no way her parents would ever spend that kind of money on her for some of those presents she’s gotten over the years.  Who knew my renowned cheapness would keep her belief in Santa alive and well?

Enough procrastinating for the day.  I’ve got to go get my proverbial Christmas doo-doo in a pile.  There are only 4 more days people!  If you still need more things to help you procrastinate, head over to    Jen’s Holiday Homes Tour if you haven’t already. Cheers all.

Season of Light.

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Lest you think, like one of Edie’s friends after walking in and admiring our Christmas tree, that our holiday flair is limited to just a big old tree in one corner of our tiny living room, I thought I’d share some of our other holiday decor while I join in the fun of  Jen’s Holiday Tour.
It takes me days to get everything out and in place.  There are some decorations that go in the same place year after year.  Then there are ones that get moved around if they get displayed at all, prompting the youngest family member to say, “Oh, I didn’t know we had this”.  We have an entire section of the attic dedicated to holiday decor,a shelf in the linen closet exclusively for Christmas linens, whose viewing is all dependent on how much I want to clean and make merry each year.  I have it in my thick skull that Santa only comes to clean houses and any space that gets rearranged for festive attire must be clean first.  As someone who’s not known for her housekeeping skills, it can take me some time to get all the decorations out and displayed.
I start slowly, with two special decorations.  The first one is my Santa house.
It sits in the corner, at the foot of the stairs.  It was my first successful foray into holiday decoration making.
According to the sticker on the bottom, hand written by my mother, I painted this all by my big girl self way back in 1973.
I turned 4 October of that year, so while you can ooh and aah over my 3 year old talented self, I can assure you that this project was the peak of my painting abilities.  I’ve never done anything so good since.  And knowing my mother, I definitely had some adult assistance, because she was never one to allow her children to do something and have it look like a child did it. I worked on my project while she worked on
Santa.
I love this Santa.  My mother collected Santas over the years and there was a year where this Santa didn’t make it out on display.  Horrified at this, I found him in a corner of the basement next to my house and brought them home with me.  Those two pieces always said Christmas to me and I am thrilled to watch them become the same for my daughter.

Santa lives in a corner in the hallway, situated so that you can see him when you first walk in the door.  Actually, you can see him from almost anywhere you stand in my tiny little house, which is good, because he needs to keep an eye on things so he knows who’s naughty or nice, right?
When I talk about how my house is small and dark, I’m not kidding.  With the days so short this time of year, I look to light up our house anyway I can. Lights and garland are a theme all over the first floor. Santa sits in a corner, under a mirror that gets a garland and multi-colored lights while mistletoe hangs from a nearby overhead light fixture.
Our dining room is a completely internal room – while there is a lovely enclosed porch to the rear of the room, the porch is not weatherized, meaning it’s not a year round room.  So the french doors between the spaces are kept mostly closed this time of year.  I drape the doors in a garland with a few strands of lights and beads attached to lighten the room up.
And if you’re starting to be impressed with the number of handmade items and effort being put into our holiday decor, let me share a secret with you.  All the garlands strung around our house are fake.  This one in particular, which hangs in the dining room is stored with the lights and beads already wrapped around it. As you can see, one of the light strands has quite a number of bulbs burnt out.  I thought that since they were ‘pearls’, it would just look like beads, so instead of taking them down, I just added more.  I am that lazy.
It may definitely be time to rework that garland though. There appear to be more burnt out lights than working ones and they no longer have that beaded look if you look closely at them.
Christmas throws up all over my living room. Garland, lights, my sterling snowflakes, stockings, advent calendar, card holder and little holiday tchotchkes we’ve acquired over the years get piled on top of each other on the stair wall.  Pat & I have monongramed purple and red velvet stockings from Pottery Barn that we got before Edie came along.  I couldn’t find one similar for her, so I made her one instead.
The body is a silk plaid, in shades of red and purple, with pink & orange running through it. When I made that for her, her very first Christmas, I had no clue orange was to become one of her favorite colors.
The stairs are also a great place to showcase the sterling silver snowflake ornaments Pat’s mother has given me for Christmas every year since we got engaged.  Tucked in on the edges of the stairs are various little holiday figures and some of my bottle brush trees. Every square inch is festive I tell you.
 The mantel gets a full overhaul.  Gone are the clutter of pictures and other things that collect all year long.  When Pat’s grandmother broke up housekeeping last fall, he inherited her mantel clock, which had belonged to her grandmother.  I didn’t want to move it, so I just decorated around it this year. 
The mantel gets covered in a beaded wire garland, vintage Christmas lights that came out of my Granny’s basement (apparently unused), various trees and a Nativity set that looks like the kids from The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. 
 The Angel wears purple high tops. 
The infant is in a little red wagon.  If you’ve never read The Best Christmas Pageant ever, I highly recommend it.  It’s a children’s book about a family of troubled kids that go to church because they heard there were free snacks. (There is also a movie version, starring Loretta Swit & a young Fairuza Balk.)  They take over the annual Christmas pageant, with some funny and moving results.  
Also on the mantel are a variety of trees I’ve either made or collected over the years.
I have a thing for bottle brush trees.
Including this vintage bottle brush tree I found at a yard sale and passed up, only to have Edie go back and get it to give to me. 
You see, it had the original price tag on the bottom, from Woody’s, for 30 cents.  No way was I paying $1 for that.
I really am that cheap.  Thank goodness my daughter’s not.

The fireplace and hearth stay the same as they do the rest of the year, although a peace lily plant gets replaced by a poinsettia. It is a working fireplace, but for a list of reasons we don’t use it.  Instead, it has numerous candles and Christmas lights that create ambiance.  Flanking the fireplace are two wire chicken shaped baskets for egg collecting filled with yet more lights. 

You can get a sense from that shot exactly how small our living room is.  It measures exactly 8 1/2 feet from the edge of the hearth to the front wall and it’s 11 feet wide.  Not very big at all.

The fireplace is not the only spot we have Christmas lights year round.  I threw this strand up over the kitchen sink this time last year and they stayed – as they make a great over the kitchen sink light.  And festive too.  I did tuck this baby away for a few months though.

A strand of lights in an old glass vase.  It makes a wonderful kitchen counter lamp in these cold, dark months.  Never underestimate the brilliance of a single strand of lights. 

How to decorate a Charlie Brown Tree.

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Every year I am asked about our tree.   We often hear we have the best tree and so I find myself answering the question,  how do I get it to look that way?
We start with a tree that Pat & Edie cut down.  We prefer imperfect looking trees.  After Ashlawn-Highland discontinued the practice of having folks cut down trees from their fields, we found a cut-it-down yourself farm near Covesville that has the sort of trees we like.
This year’s tree started out looking like this.
(That would be the good side.)
First the lights go on.
I like to work from the inside out, starting at the bottom, wrapping lights around the trunk.  When I get to the top, I move the lights out just a wee bit and work my way back down.
That’s what 200 lights look like.
Working my way up and down, out and around the tree,  you can see where I’m slowly filling it in with light.
I took this shot after I had 400 on the tree – getting close, but still, not enough.
 This was where I ran out of lights to be used on the tree. That’s 700 Christmas tree lights. I wanted more lights, but I didn’t want to go out and buy them.  So I stopped there. From the moment we brought the tree in the house Saturday, we’ve realized it’s far wider than we initially realized. So 700 lights didn’t quite go as far as I thought they would. 
I know, there are some out there that think 700 lights are excessive.  I’m strongly considering making sure I have 1000 for next year, just in case. 
Next up come the hanging of the ornaments.  Here it helps to have lots of these as well.
This is where Edie comes in to help. Left to my own devices, I will spend days getting the lights just so before then carefully considering where each ornament should go.  I think 3 days is a decent amount of time spent putting a tree up.  My offspring however, thinks that you should be able to do it in an afternoon. She’s ever so proud that this year the lights went up in one try (there have been years where I’ve taken them down and completely restarted more than once) and they were done in under 2 hours.  This year’s tree trimming was definitely the fastest it’s been probably ever.
The first ornament hung is always this gem, the lone survivor of a set of pipe cleaner and styrofoam balls my parents made their first Christmas together back in 1968.  This was the most ornate of the set and every year this was the one my dad wanted to hang first. I always hang it in a tucked away spot.  It’s definitely a bit worse for the wear, but one I can’t not hang.
Edie’s first ornament this year was this beauty, hung in a spot of honor, smack dab in the front and center of the tree.
Until we got other ornaments hung around it, it was my own little episode of having that lamp in my front window. Thankfully, by the time we were done, it was not as prominent, without me having to rearrange it.  Or knock it off while watering plants. And because that kid can hang several hundred ornaments well in less than an hour, she had it blending it in no time flat.
We have a wide variety of ornaments.  There are ones from Christmas past, like this one:
There the ones Pat & I made and were given as children, like these two:
 
 I made that Jack in the Box in Girl Scouts back in 1978.
There’s also this one, one of my favorites.  I found that at an after Christmas sale the Christmas we were engaged while I was shopping with our mothers.  Could it be any more perfect?  Every year I hang it in a prominent spot.
We have ones Edie made.
And the ones she’s acquired over the years including princesses and Hello Kitty.
Ornaments get hung similar to the way the lights go on – from the inside out, so that the tree has a bit of depth and texture to it. I like to mix them all up, so that the Mary I painted as a toddler is hanging next to a Wise Man painted by my mother from one of those 1970’s wooden ornament kits (anyone remember those?) is hanging next to a vintage Shiny Bright I bought somewhere along the way.
I have a thing for vintage Christmas ornaments.  I have a hard time passing them up at yard sales and estate sales, but these days, unless I find something so spectacular that I don’t already have, I am getting better about walking past.  Not having enough room to store them all helps. 
I finish the tree with a set of glass ‘icicles’ I was given several years ago.  There are about 2 dozen of them in various combinations of colors and styles.  After they are hung, I drape a beaded garland, add the tree skirt and call it a day.

The tree skirt is an embellished vintage item. I was given the plain red corduroy skirt with a red & gold trim and green pom poms.  I added the buttons to look like snowmen and snowflakes.  
And here is the finished tree.  While pictures never do justice to it, you can see what a difference lots of lights and a giant tub (and a half) of ornaments and a few strands of beads do for a perfectly imperfect tree.  The only thing missing are candy canes, which will be purchased and hung in the next few days.
 
And that, dear friends and readers, is how you take a Charlie Brown tree and make it beautiful. They really just need a little bit of love.

Today’s Experiment.

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I’d been kicking around the idea of putting together some cooking classes that weren’t just canning & pickling focused.  For starters, it’s a very seasonable topic, sort of a one and done class done at various venues around town, but also because I do more than just preserve food.  I preserve food because I like to cook it, because I’m passionate about knowing exactly where our food comes from and I want to ensure that my family eats local all year long.  Really, canning & pickling is just the first step, one small part of my cooking puzzle.

So there I was, kicking this idea around, trying to find a focus (why oh why does everything seem to require a freaking focus already?!?!?!) when I got an email from a friend, asking if I was interested in leading a cooking class for his department as their staff retreat.  Would I? I love when the universe sends me signs like this, I really do.  Dave’s a regular reader, so he had a few ideas of what he wanted me to teach them, but after a few suggestions, he left it up to me.

The hardest part was finding a space in which to do this.  Budget was key, which ruled out a number of places.  If only my kitchen wasn’t so small and dark, perhaps I could teach more than one person at a time out of here.  One of his coworkers was able to get a church kitchen, which actually could not have worked out better.  It was fairly well appointed and was made for a small group to cook together.

As this was an all-day class and Dave requested we do several dishes together, I had them start with lunch, which was pizza.  Once that prepwork was done, including making the dough, from scratch, by hand, we moved on to the big attraction.  Gumbo.

I’m really not sure there is anything as well suited to team work as gumbo is. There is plenty of chopping to go around, there is roux to be made as well as broth.  I walked them through how I like to do it – using as many burners as I can. At one point, we had the broth simmering, sauce for the pizza cooking, roux browning and the holy trinity sauteing to start the gumbo.

  If you take it step by step, you could spend all day making a pot of gumbo.  As much as I think it’s worth it, I also love doing as much as possible all at once.  Even that though, takes prepwork, and teamwork.
 Although Dave did try to do a big chunk of it on his own.

Lunch was absolutely delish if I say so myself.  We did a roasted butternut squash, sage and goat cheese pizza (which Dave had requested after reading that post) as well as a plain cheese pizza.  Just yesterday I read a piece on Beyond the Flavor about Michael McCarthy of Dr. Ho’s Humble Pie making pizza at home and couldn’t help but notice his oven was much hotter than I set mine – 550 vs. 450. Inspired, I decided to experiment with that temperature and honestly, I have to say that that cheese pizza tasted just like one you’d get a pizza shop.  I’m still patting myself on the back for using that bit of knowledge – so much so that I came home and have already started the dough for dinner.

Thankfully, no one else in this house had pizza for lunch, so there will be no lectures on their part about how pizza twice a day might not be healthy, not to mention boring.  At least she got over the whole no cold pizza for breakfast thing.

I digress.  After we feasted on our pizza lunch, we headed back into the kitchen.  There, I showed them how to make the easiest and most divine chocolate cake ever.  I love sharing that secret – that a handful of ingredients, assembled in 5 minutes and baked for 30, can fool everyone you know into thinking you are a baking genius.

One of the downsides of cooking around your camera, is that sometimes you get stuff on the lens. It does, however, lend a dreamy quality to the picture, doesn’t it?

We finished the day with biscuits. I got to expound on a bit about my biscuit theory and shared with them my whole grain version, even throwing a little bit of lard into the equation.  After putting a few of our biscuits in the oven to be sampled, the rest were divided and packed up, to be baked later in the day at home.  After all, who wants to spend a day cooking only to have to go home and do it all over again?  Not only did everyone take home biscuits, they had been instructed to bring along tupperware and so everyone took home gumbo after sampling the finished product.  It was declared a success and while I am still mentally critiquing myself as to what I can do better, I also changed some things on the fly that turned out pretty good.  That’s the secret to good cooking (and life really), is being able to adapt without flinching.  It’s all in the instincts.  Can you convey that in a cooking class?  I sort of think I did.