Catching up on Christmas

 I'm so happy that the holiday season is drawing to a close! I enjoyed it, for the most part, but things were hectic at times!

Whatever possessed me to think that homemade cookies and cakes would be easy, inexpensive gifts to give? I worked my butt off, and the fruitcakes and cookies and other treats ended up costing an arm and a leg. BUT, everything turned out great....especially the fruitcakes! I still have a whole one and half of another left for our enjoyment, and the people who received one raved about them. Since I ended up winging it in regards to the actual recipe, I was certainly relieved that they ended up tasting fantastic! There were also lots (and lots!) of homemade sugar cookies.....



My favorites were the cutout snowflakes, even though they were the most time consuming to make and decorate.

 

While I'm on the subject of holiday baking, I'd like to give a shout out to Liz over at The Vintage Inn for sending me a lovely Christmas cookbook published in 1958 for my vintage secret Santa gift! I adore vintage cookbooks, and have a growing collection of them. In fact, all sorts of vintage items from the 1930's through the 1950's fascinate me, but housekeeping, cooking, and etiquette books top the items I look for whenever I'm scouring thrift stores. Thank you, Liz! The book was perfect. And thanks again to dear Jessica over at Chronically Vintage for coming up with the secret Santa idea in the first place, and then making it happen. It sure was fun!

Despite the hectic days leading up to Christmas, the actual day itself was peaceful and relaxing. It was just me, my dear husband, and our animal companions. Santa left bird toys and dog bones at our house.....

 

Messy George takes EVERYTHING
back to the dog bed, even sticky bones.

 

Ginger takes hers outside,
like the polite, mannerly girl she is!

 

 ....which kept Marco, George, and Ginger occupied for the first part of the day.

 

GB and I had lots of good food. I'd bought a nice (miniature) honey baked ham, and King's Hawaiian bread for making delicious sandwiches with it. We had raw veggies with dip, three cheeses, assorted crackers and nuts, tangerines, homemade fruitcake saturated with brandy and rum, and sugar cookies.

 

We took two long walks with the dogs in the afternoon. Several neighbors were out and about, and a few called out "Merry Christmas!" as we passed. I love that kind of neighborly interaction. The sun was out and the temperature was only cool enough for a light jacket. A great day for walking.

 

 

 

 

 

 I hope everyone had a good holiday, too. Now onward into the New Year!





  

Midwinter Nights

I know several other bloggers have shared the following poem, but it's one of my favorites this time of year and I wanted to post it here for those who may not be familiar with it. It's from my one of my very favorite midwinter reads, Susan Cooper's "The Dark Is Rising".

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!~ The Shortest Day by Susan Cooper

 

 

These days and night surrounding the solstice have been appropriately dark, cold, and wet. Brooding, chilly fog has been hovering over the area every day, and it's been perfect for lighting the fireplace to chase away the chill. Holiday lights glow warmly in the gloom. Our house smells of cookies and cakes baking, spices, and oranges. We're grateful for all of our comforts and the love of family and friends during these short, dark days while we wait for the light to return.

 

Peace.

Tipsy fruits!

After searching for weeks for the perfect traditional fruitcake recipe, I ended up feeling overwhelmed with all the possible variations in methods and ingredients.  Since no one recipe seemed just right, I finally decided to wing it and come up with my own version, with a little help from my vintage (40's and 50's era) cookbooks. I don't know yet how it's all going to pan out (pan out! ha!) but I've got about 6 pounds of good quality dried fruits and nuts marinating in brandy. I'll be baking the cakes tomorrow, and I sure hope they're not failures. If they are, they'll be expensive failures.

Soaking up the holiday spirit!

The dried fruits and nuts I chose:

Tart cherries, golden raisins, cranberries, apricots, dates, pineapple, candied lemon peel, figs, pecans, and walnuts.

Tis the season (to be busy!)

Christmas is only thirteen days away. Thirteen! I can't believe how this month is flying by!

The last of the Christmas cards were filled out this morning and will be mailed later today. The ingredients for the cookies, cakes, and other treats I'll be making for gifts have been purchased and are ready to go. A few small gifts for family and friends have been purchased, but nothing over the top or too expensive. I'm still trying very, very hard to keep the holidays simple.

Yesterday I found the cutest little gifts to give to a couple of lady coworkers of mine......

They're glass globes with a bit of moss in the bottom and tiny little "air plants" (Tillandsia, a kind of bromeliad) inside. They are meant for hanging in a windowsill. Aren't they pretty? I'll also include small boxes of homemade sugar cookies for the ladies. For the guys, I plan to buy craft beers to be given alongside homemade cheese wafers and Chex mix.

I'm also taking part in a secret Santa gift exchange my friend Jessica over at Chronically Vintage is hosting, and I finally found the gifts I want to send to the person assigned to me, and will be shipping those out (to Alaska!) this weekend as well. I'll post photos of the package I'm sending as soon as Christmas gets here. Although I'm almost certain the recipient doesn't read my blog, I'd hate to ruin a surprise. And I'm eagerly waiting to see who got my name and what they will choose to send to me! Jessica is a dear for coming up with this idea and making it happen. It's been a lot of fun!

Well, I'm off to swing by the dollar store before work to look for some gift wrapping, ribbons, and bows, as well as goodie boxes and tins. Then comes another busy Friday night at the bookstore!

How are your holiday preparations coming?

Catching back up, and keeping Christmas simple

Where the heck did November go???

It's December 1st already, and despite my best intentions these last couple of months to sit down and give this blog more attention, I keep finding myself too busy to do it. Part of the reason, of course, is that old ball and chain, work.

 Retail management is pure drudgery during the holidays, and preparing for them begins in earnest in October. My job, while never happy, has been particularly difficult this year. We have a couple of members of the management team that have completely gone off the rails in their personal lives, including some serious drug addiction issues. As you can imagine, that leaves the rest of us forced to cover their absenteeism and neglect of their job duties. The rest of the store team is demoralized, which has led to calling out, bad attitudes, loss of productivity, and a whole lot of turnover. The atmosphere is so negative and things are so bad that the turnover has included several of our most dependable, long-term employees. Slowly but surely they're finding other jobs without all the dysfunction. And who could blame them?

I was so hopeful at the start of this year that I'd be one of the lucky ones with a new job by the time the holidays rolled around! It was my one and only resolution for 2014, and I have to admit I'm disappointed. The local economy isn't good, and competition for the kind of job I want is high. I was very discouraged for a while, but now that I've resigned myself to the fact that it's not going to happen as quickly as I'd hoped, I'm feeling better about continuing to search. In the meantime, I'm putting in extra hours and coming home extra tired, and that's put a damper on lots of things, not just blogging. Days off have been spent doing the necessary housework, chores, and caring for our feathered and furry housemates.

I've also been trying, during odd moments, to prepare for the upcoming holiday. I'm keeping gifts simple and inexpensive this year. Homemade food items, like flavored vinegars, vanilla extract, and Christmas cookies, and homemade (but simple to make) filled candles will constitute a majority of the gifts we'll be giving this year, with a few books or small items thrown in here and there. I can't take the crowded stores, the mad rush of shopping, the feeling like nothing you buy is ever enough this year. I despise it all, including the fact that the Christmas machine starts up earlier and earlier every year, and then really kicks off with the travesty known, appropriately, as Black Friday. No thanks. This year, I want to try to take it easier and find some small portion of the holiday to enjoy.

Stay tuned for photos of the gift projects I've finished so far, as well as some knitting I've been working on. I'm also still looking for a good, traditional fruit cake recipe and deciding on what kinds of Christmas cookies to make, so if anyone has suggestions I would love to hear them! Anyone else out there making or baking gifts this year? Or finding other ways to keep the holidays simple and inexpensive? Please share!

Frigid weather, first fires

It's cold out today, unusually so for this time of year. From the very beginning, this month has been setting records for winter weather. On Nov 1 a city an hour west of my home got snow---the earliest snowfall in something like 150 years. There has been frost almost every night since. Then, night before last, the temperature dropped to 18°F, breaking records for this time of year. Nights that cold rarely happen in January, much less November.

On frigid nights like these, I'm grateful this house has a fireplace. Nothing makes you toasty warm and comfortable like a good fire, and the flames always seem cheerful. Being able to have fires this early in the year has been one advantage of the cold, cold weather. Any extra cheer on these long winter nights is most welcome. I've found that a small glass of rum laced eggnog sipped in front of the fire doesn't hurt either!

Candy Mischief

Halloween was a bit of a bust. I bought candy and small toys, lit up the plastic jack-o-lanterns, and rushed home from work to be here in time to welcome any kids that showed up. Unfortunately, not a single trick or treater rang the bell. I wasn't altogether surprised, since our neighborhood runs mostly to retired couples. We never see very many, but none at all was a letdown. The only good part of that was all the leftover candy.

A bowl of which we had on our kitchen counter, beside Marco's cage.

And he's a little terrorist that lives for trouble and sneaking around. We should have known better.

I got home from work the other night and my husband met me at the door to tell me that Marco had raided the candy bowl. He had been playing happily on top of his cage for an hour, and so my husband forgot he was out and went to the other room to mess around on the computer. When he finally remembered and went to check on Marco, that crazy bird had eaten most of a miniature Heath chocolate bar! We were worried about the chocolate, but he seemed fine afterwards, and so we threw away the bowl of (half-chewed) candies and forgot about it. Until the next morning.

Once again, Mr. Man was playing on top of his cage. I went to the bathroom, and then made a couple of phone calls. When I went back to check on him, he was gone. After searching the house, I finally found him in the dining room. Somehow, he had figured out that we still had some candy left in a plastic bag on the dining room table. This is how I found him:

Enjoying a Whopper malted milk ball, and making a chocolatey mess on my grandmother's lace tablecloth.

This is how you grow

Despite the fact that I've lived my whole life within 30 miles of where I was born, I've always been really interested in and curious about people from all over the world. I'm grateful to be an adult at this point in time, where the world is literally at your fingertips via the internet and people can share information instantly. Discovering blogs and blogging has been a real delight, as it gives me a chance to indulge my love of learning about everyday life in far flung places. I've also been working to learn Spanish this year, and in my clumsy attempts to practice speaking it I've met and gotten to know some really interesting people.

And speaking of meeting interesting people, and clumsy attempts at speaking Spanish.....

A nice older couple visit the bookstore where I work almost every evening to sip espressos and share a dessert. They're distinguished looking people, the owners of one of the nicer jewelry stores in the area, and originally from Colombia. The husband has a big, warm smile and is unfailingly friendly and courteous, so I finally got up the nerve to tell him I'm trying to learn Spanish. His response was "Wonderful! Don't be ashamed to practice or afraid of making mistakes. It's how you learn!" Which is true, and so we began practicing a little whenever he comes in. One subject I can usually do really well talking about in Spanish is my dogs, so I decided to tell him about Ginger and George. It was going fairly well at first, but I tend to get nervous and a bit tongue tied after awhile when a native speaker is listening. So after going on about how wild George is, and how much extra energy he has, I said, (or meant to say) "We walk our dogs every day." The man looked at me funny for a minute, and then started laughing. And I, totally clueless, kept saying "What? What did I say?" while he laughed and laughed.

Unfortunately for me, the verb for "we walk" and "we eat" sound similar. I had just told this nice gentleman that we eat our dogs everyday! Nice!

Yo no come mis perros!