Apologies for the lack of posts. I’m just not feeling very bloggy of late. We’ve jumped into our family Christmas celebrations and preparations, since the weather (we were up to -20 C for a few days, but this morning was -30 C again. Brrr…) made us think of staying indoors and baking and decorating and making soup and hiding behind closed doors with rustly papers and snipping sounds and making tunnels and factories and graineries out of Kleenex boxes and tin cans to add to the train set. The kids also dug out the Running Press Hanukkah Candle kit — which I bought on deep discount a few years ago at Winners — the other day and set to making enough candles for all eight days. They are beautiful — colorful and glittery.
I gave myself an early Christmas present. My aged Apple monitor (if I recall correctly, Apple calls them displays) starting acting up for the second time in several months, celebrating the holidays by turning various shades of blue, green, and purple, interrupted by horizontal hiccups. Very festive but rather worrying. When I looked at Apple displays (cinema displays, no less) earlier in the year, I had a heart attack at the prices and was relieved to know that having a Mac Mini didn’t mean I was committed to an Apple monitor. So I looked at the Dell website and was delighted to find something for much, much less. So I know have a 19″ flat screen monitor, the first one that is wider than it is deep. I don’t know what to do with all the space. And once again I’m delighted for the modern conveniences that make it possible to shop without setting foot in stores.
Today we made some more cookies. I dug out my December 1995 issue of Gourmet magazine (hurray for Gail Zwiegenthal), and we made two variations of the butter cookies from Leslie Pendleton Glover’s article, the Jelly Bowl cookies with our homemade golden plum jam, and the very, very tasty Raspberry Hazelnut Triangles, which are indeed like “bite-size Linzer-tortes”. For the first time, I used my grandmother’s old rolling pin, one of the things I brought back from our NYC trip, and I taught Davy how to toast hazelnuts in the oven and then rub the skins off, the way my grandmother once taught me.
If anything, the blogging will become more sporadic from hereon in. Sunday we go into the woods for the tree, and Christmas Eve is our big celebration with the extended family. What I will try to do is post some fun links below, and as I can in the next while post some holiday repeats…
Fun links:
Via the papercraft blog Paper Forest, striped paper ball ornaments (there’s a video tutorial at another nifty blog) and also a sweet Holiday Paper Village that would be just thing to make after Christmas.
Cassi at Bella Dia has a round up of all the free printable gift tags she’s collected over the years. Cassi also has the perfect gift for the person who has everything.
The first of the holiday repeats, from December 2005, my first blogging Christmas: Christmas in the Country, Part 1 and Christmas in the Country, Part 2, a lovely essay by Justin Isherwood
Filed under: Blogging
Happy Holidays, Becky! We are not quite as cold as you, but are expecting 8-10 inches of snow today. We’ll be staying in to make cookies and wrap presents, too, so thanks for the pointers to the recipes–new ones always welcome. Stay cozy!
~Christina in MA
Sounds fun (except for the hazlenuts, yich). And you folks celebrate the same time as we do, cool. My Ukey friends here (of the garden annex) are doing Christmas on Jan 6th (well, the 7th because her mother is coming from BC a day late and… well lets just say that there are a lot of jokes flying about the calendar). We’ve been invited so we get 2 Christmas dinners, reasonably spaced.
Have a great one.
Have a wonderful holiday.
I thought my holiday baking was complete until I was reminded that I’d failed to bake gingerbread children. Swell.
Sunday we’re going to hook up the transformers and track to grandpa’s train set and see if we can get it going-that ought to be great fun.
Happy holidays, Christina, and enjoy the snow!
Merry Christmas x 2, JoVE!
JS, have a wonderful time too. No gingerbread kiddies here, but the real kiddies now have a gingerbread house. And at this point if they want a certain type of cookie that I’m not baking, they can do it themselves! Have fun with that train — ours has provided endless hours of pleasure already. Now I just need to locate some liquid smoke drops or smoke pellets…