etc.

I wish you could see Louis Armstrong singing White Christmas in the background, because he is.

This state of readiness is somewhat new to me. I feel organized enough this year that it could have been Christmas last week! If you’ve been here for a while you’ll know that this rarely happens. I’m not quite sure how it all came together (I don’t think I did much differently this year), but I’ll take it.

Happy holidays, everyone! I wish you similar readiness, along with a healthy dose of cheer, and plenty of joy!

Happy 2007, gentle readers! I hope you welcomed in 2007 in your own favourite way. We certainly did — with a big meal and a movie at my parents’ house. Tasty, quiet, low-key, perfect!

Here’s a little something that I’ve been keeping from you: my very first finished object of 2007! I had hoped it would be my last finished object of 2006, but it took about 16 hours too long to make the deadline. Astute readers might recall me dropping blatantly unsubtle hints about being consumed by a mystery project, and I know you’ve all been mighty puzzled about what it might be (hah!), so wonder no more! My parents celebrated their 35th anniversary on December 27th and this quilt was a gift to them from me & the mister, and my sister & her mister.

For any quilters who might be reading, here are some details:

• The pattern is “What a Bunch of Squares” from Denyse Schmidt’s excellent book.
• I machine-pieced the quilt top and did the quilting by hand.
• It took me precisely 30 days to complete, start to finish (and when I say start, I mean cutting-out-templates-start). When I wasn’t at work, or marking assignments, or doing other holiday-prep, I was working on the quilt. Activity definitely intensified once Christmas was over — I must have spent 16 hours a day on the couch during that final week, quilting and eating cookies and drinking tea. Not a bad way to spend the holidays!
• I used two different beiges and a variety of dark reds/burnt oranges. Here’s a picture of the fabric right out of the store.
• I followed every bit of instruction, down to the very last detail. I’m usually no good at that, I’m the sort of crafter who looks at patterns for “ideas”, then I ad lib as I go along. This time, the finished product was too important, and I acknowledged early on that I have too little quilting experience to make it up as I went, so I sucked that book clean of all instructions and diagrams. And it was worth it.
• All pictures, from start to finish, are in a photoset on Flickr.

More quilting thoughts & lessons learned coming soon. Welcome, aught-seven! So happy to see you.

Yes. Yes it was. For all the kvetching I did last week (and there was a lot of it, both online and off-), things ended up coming together like you said they would. My cards were written and in the post on Wednesday; shortbread was baked, the holiday reading list was compiled, and all the gifts were wrapped on Thursday; ginger snaps were baked (I pulled off 2 cookie varieties, yay me), and international gifts were mailed on Friday. Late? Yes. But done, nonetheless. Accompanied with a feeling of suitable accomplishment, along with some remorse for all the complaining and poor spirits!

The one thing we didn’t do was put up the Christmas tree (that’s my parents’ tree up there -isn’t it lovely?). Every year we come very close to not putting up the tree, mostly because it’s a fiddly job, with hundreds of individually labeled branches that need to be attached to the fuzzy, fake bark individually. A tedious job at best, and once you’re done with the assembly, it’s on to stringing the lights, isn’t it? More tedium. So, this year, we just didn’t get around to it, and although I managed to convince the mister that we should pick up a real tree (I argue for a real tree every year), we never got around to that either. Practically speaking, it’s not that big a deal since most of the holiday celebrating we do is at homes other than our own, but it’s still a little startlingly amusing to leave our decoration-deficient home and realise, hey yeah, it is Christmas!

Well, now. I’ve settled right back into old habits quite nicely, haven’t I?

We’ve been Christmas shopping three times over the last six days, which is three times too many for this shopping-hater. I’ve done quite well with handmade gifts over the past few years, but this year family and friends are getting shop-bought gifties (sorry, family & friends!) on account of two all-consuming things I’ve been working on all month (one professorial, the other not). To-day, we went to the craziest mall in this town, which was a ridiculously asinine thing to do, we avoid this mall every other day of the year, why did we think it was a good idea to go there on a Friday afternoon 10 days before Christmas? Asinine. We left 45 minutes after we got there, with one small shopping bag in hand. A shopping bag that contained no gifts. Asinine.

I love making and buying and giving things to the people I love, but this time of year just makes me grouchy. If I had more time — if only I had more time! — and if I was more organized — nay, organized at all! — I do think I would be more cheerful and happy and filled with nothing but the milk of human kindness. I haven’t written or sent cards, the tree is not up, I have no idea what to get the mister, and I’ve just decided that I’m scaling back my holiday baking to a single — one! — variety of holiday cookie. If you’ve come in search of holiday cheer, let me apologize for the short shrift.

Grouch, grouch, grumble, grumble.

Hey, guess what? When I got home this evening I caught myself thinking, “don’t forget to blog to-night.” I think one might safely call this habit-formation. So, in honour of December (and the frigid cold that has descended upon us in such an annoyingly timely manner) here’s a holiday meme spotted on Moni’s blog:

1. Eggnog or Hot Chocolate?
Neither, thanks. Eggnog is an abomination and I’ve never been much of a hot chocolate fan either.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree?
Wrapped, always! I didn’t realize there was another option.

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white?
White.

4. Do you hang mistletoe?
No.

5. When do you put your decorations up?
Usually really late (last year we did it on the 22nd!). This year, we’re a bit more organized, we’ll probably get them up this weekend.

6. What is your favorite holiday dish (excluding dessert)?
Stuffing and gravy.

7. What is your favorite holiday memory as a child?
It’s sort of a collective memory of all the Christmases as a kid, when my parents miraculously managed to get our gifts under the tree while we were out at midnight Mass on the 24th. Yes, yes, I know they probably did it before we left, but they were pretty crafty about it because we never caught them! I love it that they continued to do this until well after we knew the truth about Santa Claus.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa?
I think I knew long before I actually admitted it to anyone. While I don’t remember the exact circumstances surrounding the revelation, I’m pretty sure my sister had something to do with it (older siblings usually do, don’t they? It’s almost a birthright).

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve?
We used to open all our gifts on Christmas eve! Now we do it in bits and pieces, mostly when we’re with our families.

10. How do you decorate your Christmas tree?
Quickly. For whatever reason, I don’t enjoy doing it.

11. Snow! Love it or dread it?
Neither, I’m mostly indifferent to it. I still get excited about the first major snowfall though, and shiny, powdery flakes on Christmas day is lovely!

12. Can you ice skate?
Yep, used to be a figure skater. But I haven’t laced up the skates in about 7 years.

13. Do you remember your favorite gift?
As a kid it had to be my cabbage patch doll (I was mental over those things; in fact, I still think they’re sort of adorable. There’s a toy that could use a comeback). As an adult, they’re all my favourite! We have some pretty thoughtful gift-givers in our family, so no Christmas cake in my stocking, thankfully. Or lumps of coal, for that matter.

14. What’s the most important thing about the holidays for you?
Family. Down time. Down time with family, especially.

15. What is your favorite holiday dessert?
The cookies. And all the sweets my mum makes.

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition?
At the moment, all I can think about is the considerable amount of couch-lounging and reading the mister & I do during the holidays. I usually assemble two small piles of books for the two of us and we do a pretty good job of just sitting around and reading through our respective piles over the holidays. I find myself thinking fondly and longingly of this tradition all year long!

17. What is your favorite part about Christmas morning?
The anticipation!

18. Which do you prefer – giving or receiving?
Giving. Especially when it’s something I’ve made. Not to knock receiving or anything.

19. What is your favorite Christmas Song?
Happy Christmas (War is Over), John Lennon.

20. Candy canes! Yuck or Yum?
Yum.

There has been eating and drinking and merrymaking in spades, the holidays are going swimmingly. What is it about this season that makes it okay to have sugar cookies, butter horns, and hot tea for breakfast? Whatever it is, I like it. Here are some films we’ve watched lately, starred out of five:

• Syriana ****
• Serenity ****
• Bad Santa *
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ***
• The Amityville Horror **
• Boogeyman **
• Munich ****

There was no consensus at all on Munich, the mister insisted that I tell you. We watched it with my family and we were split well down the middle: half of us thought it was brave and balanced, the other half thought it was boring and biased. The four-star rating above represents the right half, of course.

At the moment, I am warmly ensconced in Jonathan Franzen’s embrace: The Corrections is an impeccable book, I commend it to you without reservation.

Did you sashay your way into 2005?

We played Scrabble and I narrowly beat the world’s ultimate Scrabble ringer, my grandmother. She outscored the rest of us all evening and it was those final two rounds that did her in unfortunately (I closed out the game with a “V” and a “D” and a couple of vowels, oodles of possibilities). Of course, I took more pleasure in beating the mister, whose two consecutive New Year’s Scrabble victories gave him swashbuckling bragging rights in 2003 and 2004. Guess who gets to hotdog in 2005?

And, where are you J.D. Salinger? Happy birthday, I hope you, too, get to hotdog this year.

Things get busy around here and I just about forget this virtual place of mine.

No one does Christmas like our parents do Christmas. We had Eve dinner at my parents house, Christmas brunch also at my parents house, Christmas dinner at the mister’s parents house and Boxing Day was mostly cookies, biscotti, and sundry leftovers from all those meals. I’ve been doing some reading, DVD-watching, and no knitting at all, on account of all the rushed gift-knitting that got crammed in over the past twelve days. I sort of promised myself that I wouldn’t pick up the needles until after this mini-vacation was over, to allow the fingers some rest, but I’m already getting antsy, and the yarn jonesing has already begun and I’ll probably be knitting again before the day is out.

Happy day after Boxing Day.

I get a whole lot of pleasure from holding paper in my hand, which, for me, is not at all in conflict with being a web/tech geek. You might recall that a few months ago, I drew up a hasty knitting needle inventory spreadsheet, and while it was nice to know that I wouldn’t have to sift through the actual needles to figure out whether or not I had the correct sizes for a particular project, it was still pretty crazymaking to have to wait until I got home to look at the spreadsheet or scramble to find a computer so I could check my website before knowing for sure whether my needle needs were already taken care of. So, I redid the inventory (try to overlook the bad scan, would you?) to appropriate print specifications (i.e.: small, portable, mounted on cardstock), and if you look really closely you will also see that I trimmed down a page protector for the wee slip of paper, so that the detritus in my bag wouldn’t undermine its integrity. Now I have my entire inventory on hand for quick reference, and I’m positively gleeful about it.

Also, happy Winter solstice.