This Calls For A Very Special Title

We got - amongst many, many other things - a huge stack of Wii games for Christmas, and that is because we are blessed with generous relatives, and also because we're the only ones in our family who have said Yes! to Poverty. And that was, in retrospect VERY STUPID of us and I am going to go back in time and become a CEO or something. So post-Christmas is VERY much like that scene in A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett (have you read that book? You should.) where Sara wakes up and the garret where she's been living is suddenly - overnight! -filled with lush things and good food, and it's all very magical but she's still LIVING IN AN ATTIC.

So anyhoo. We now have one of the Guitar Hero games and my kids now have a new hobby of laughing at their mom as she rocks out. Apparently, nothing in the history of the world is funnier than your chubby mother making Rock Star faces as she plays musical Simon.

We also got American Idol Encore, which I am - in complete modesty - astonishingly AWESOME at even though my singing voice is, at best, ungood. My version of Bohemian Rhapsody brought tears of unjoy to my husband's eyes.

I've also been reading some books, since my husband is home for a week - a week! - and the living is easy and we keep forgetting to make proper meals. I've been reading Evangelical Theology by Karl Barth and The Way of Ignorance by Wendell Berry (Christmas gifts from my husband both) and then I go and play stupid games so I don't get wrinkles.

I've written a few scathing, ranting posts in my head - I've had a special week - but lacked the time to sit down and write, and so this is what you get instead. Inanity! You're welcome.

And the winner is.....

The winner - doooo dooo dooo! - was my friend Susanne. I wish I could have sent everyone who entered the prize, since all of you picked such great charities, but the actual prize itself was accorded by the official scientific method, which involved yelling upstairs at The Boy to pick a number from one to fourteen.

Five GOOOOLDEN rings!

WOW! I was just sitting here, labouring away at my Kitchen Party post, and my husband brought me a stack of buckwheat pancakes covered in maple syrup. I LOVE THAT MAN.

Before I send you over to read all about my New Year's Eve plans, I have a little giveaway for everyone this time - $25 to donate to the charity of your choice through CanadaHelps. I found EVERY charity and non-profit organization I could think of on there, and can't decide whether I'm going to donate to Breakfast For Learning or the local Meals on Wheels. Hmm, choices. So if you would like to donate money to the Canadian branch of your favorite charity or your church or local non-profit group, let me know in the comments here (and what your choice of charity would be, since I'm snoopy) and I'll pick someone tonight. (Any donations will count for this year's tax purposes if made by December 31st, so HURRY UP!)

Picked your charity and left your comment for the draw here? Okay, now go read my Kitchen Party post! xo

On the Fourth Day of Christmas

... I was slightly ill from all of that Christmas over-imbibing. Also, there's an ice storm going on outside. How festive.

This is traditionally the Feast of the Holy Innocents - the day to remember the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem, which is both horribly sad and gruesome but also an important part of the Christmas story and something that the modern one-day celebration of Christmas utterly sweeps under the rug. In olden days, little kids would dress up as old people and bug people from door to door for candy and cakes and coins - it's surprising how many Halloween-style days there used to be, and how dull we are now. It's also traditional to make a white dessert with a red sauce, the symbolism of which I do not think needs to be explained, but which I think is QUITE disgusting. I'm making cherry panna cotta.

We were given lots of candy for Christmas. LOTS. Wanna see?

Remember my animal cracker post? This time, I found a rat AND a bat, and I had a lot of fun dividing the animals up into domesticated and wild groups. We didn't eat them (yet) because they are the following flavour:

Mm! Seaweed! My son says he's packing them into school next week.

North American packaging falls down in the cuteness department - look at this!

And that's just the back. Here's the front:

If things looked like that in my grocery store, it would be AMAZING. I would be so happy. I would not be so happy to have to ask for the following candy by name, however:

Mmm, no. But just for you, I will now do a taste test even though they might be seaweed flavoured.
Opening the package... doo doo doo... eating a candy. Hmm. Hey, they're good! They're teeny, and not like gumdrops - they're VERY soft. WAIT, I just ate a green one, which tasted like underpants. But the rest of them are fine. I recommend them. Jofukuki! Ask for them by name!

And now onto the Candy Sent From Holland part:

Groentjes AND Kruidnootjes? GOOD times. You'll note that the bottom of the package of Bruidnootjes is cut off and that is become it is - to my easily offended Canadian eyes- REMARKABLY racist.

Anyhoo. How have your holidays been?

Twas The Night Before Christmas

And here is where I would write a silly take-off on that poem if I wasn't so astonishingly busy that my head is one big jittery to do list. Also, The Baby keeps feeding me M&Ms because if I eat them, she can eat them, too. Sneaky.

I shaved a ham earlier today. You. Do. Not. Want. To Know. On the plus side, there's an awesome head-start on that diet!

Here's an early Christmas present I got last night: a dear friend of mine is six months pregnant and was driving in a nearby city with her two little boys in their new van - a Christmas present from her parents - when they were broadsided by a transport. They were all okay, miraculously enough, and I keep having the shivery knowledge that her previous car - her car of just a few weeks ago - was a little compact car.... I'm going to make her some fudge, because nothing says "I'm glad you survived that terrifying accident!" better than a nice plate of fudge.

Anyhow. We're checking in on the computer quite frequently to see where Santa is at any given time - in Myammar, right now - and it gives me a funny sort of feeling, this shared knowledge that I am at once a reasonably sensible adult and at the same time HERE COMES SANTA!

Merry Christmas to you!

The Best Way To Spread Christmas Cheer

You HAVE to go read today's Kitchen Party post and find out why I'm just weepingly proud of one of my kids. It's festive! There is crying! See you there!

And the winner is!

This draw was conducted by the highly scientific method of writing all the names on slips of paper, putting them in a paper lumiera bag and letting The Boy pull a name out, and the winner is.....

ANGELA FEHR!

Congratulations! Email me your mailing information and I'll mail it out to you tomorrow.

A Holly Jolly Giveaway For You Guys

I don't normally do giveaways, but in the spirit of Christmas I thought "Oh, what the heck." So I'm giving away a $25 iTunes giftcard*, suitable for either using for your very own self or regifting on some particularily hard-to-give-to teenaged family member, perhaps.

So my Canadian friends (Sorry, other readers! I'll see what I can do about a giveaway for you guys in the New Year, okay?), leave me a comment saying that you'd like a chance of winning and I'll draw one name Sunday night. Then I'll get the gift card into the mail for you pronto on Monday morning, giving it a fighting chance of getting to your place just in time for Christmas.

(*you can also buy iTunes cards at Sobeys, Mac’s and A&P in the GTA and Safeway, Save-on Foods and Coop in the Vancouver area, which is handy.)

Portage and Main Fifty Below

It is too cold out today.

I have a long list of things that I was supposed to do, errands I was supposed to run - cards to mail out, MUCH needed groceries to buy, library books to return, tape and wrapping paper to buy - but it's -30. Or -22, if you're a farenheit person.

I stepped outside for a moment and every cell in my body screamed at me to get back in the house, which I did. Then I shivered in my warm, warm house for half an hour, that moment's exposure enough to chill my bones - so now we're stuck in here with empty cupboards, with a stack of Christmas cards waiting on the lonely counter.

Someone is walking by wearing a Santa hat.

My grandma had a cold room off of her kitchen, lined with rough shelves and at Christmas she would make pans of fudge and let them set on the freezer. I remembered the smell of that room this morning - smell being such an unpredictable trigger for memory - although I can't remember now what it was, aside from it being a not-unpleasant earthy smell mingled with chocolate, the smell of friendly coldness.

There's nothing friendly about the cold outside right now. There's no one on the streets - the lone pedestrian is long gone from my view, her Santa hat just the memory of red. The sky is grey. Soon, it will snow.

Elsewhere

My Five Minutes For Parenting post is up, and it's sort of about yesterday's Christmas concert.

The sweet little dolly on the tree yesterday came from Too Cute. The Baby, mystifyingly enough, calls little wooden dolls like that "Pandoras." What?

My Tree!

I've seen a few other bloggers posting about favorite Christmas tree ornaments, and since I am saving my poignant post for tomorrow, let me present: My Favorite Decorations (Tree Version).

It's my angels again! And look - my sweet little E has been fixed! I'm so glad she's back.
And no, they don't go on the tree. But they're looking at it. Just like my cat!

This is my Other Cat, the non-obese one. She's quite old and very gentle and has been sitting in that box with her head sticking out for the past several days just STARING at the tree.

Here - you can almost see this in her picture - she's been staring at THIS ornament in particular:

A little tiny person! Oh, how she would like to eat it!

St. Nicholas brought that little dolly to The Baby, who LOVES the colour purple, and she was super-enchanted. Good job, St. Nicholas.

Some sort of wintry miniature Santa riding a snowy owl:

Now in Blur-o-vision!

Another Santa. This one is VERY, VERY old:

He hung on my Grandma's tree. He used to have a buddy with one of those fairy tale mushrooms for a head but I broke him.

Because I have many, many children, most of my ornaments look like this:

Which is to say hand-crafted and dipped in glitter. Very festive.

Oh, those Dutch children, always making out:

Either my mother-in-law or my grandmother-in-law brought that back from a trip to visit family in Holland. They really look like they're swallowing each other's faces, don't they?

My mom brought me this guy yesterday as a Happy Tuesday! gift:

He's cute!

And here is a giant red glass apple that my husband and I bought on our honeymoon in a store in Stratford:

I should have stuck The Baby next to it or something so you could appreciate how mammoth that freaking thing is.

And here is my favorite ornament ever:

She was in my stocking the first Christmas I ever was a mother, and my feelings about how enchanting she is are totally woven up into my memories of that time.

Now that you've seen my tree, you can tell me what to go buy my husband!

Your Help Needed!

Okay, I'm almost out of time here, but I need ideas for good stocking stuffers for my husband - he's an artsy geeky guy, so sports stuff wouldn't be appropriate (you can't see me cackling away at the very thought of this.), and I have a few nice things for his stocking, so what I need ideas for are little mid-sized filler things (that don't cost a ton, of course.). Stocking Stuffers For Men - what do you do?

Random

1. So last night I decided that my main problem is that I don't bake enough or something, so I made a batch of buckeyes. It was all well and good until I realized that I was out of gluten-free icing sugar, but it was too late to stop so I just went ahead with the white sugar and now my cookies are weirdly CRUNCHY, much the way that eating a big handful of sugar right out of the bag might be. It's not unpleasant but I find it off-putting. The Baby, however, thinks they're dandy.

2. I just rearranged my living room and dragged the futon in for its annual Christmas appearance, the festival that crams more people into my living room then my living room can comfortably hold. Our office - where I am right this minute - is also going to undergo its once a year transformation into A Formal Dining Room. Christmas! My house looks different!

3. Now that we've shaken the Really Long Flu, The Boy - who never had it - has managed to catch a really bad cold. Did I mention that I love winter?

4. Their Christmas concert is tomorrow. I am fully expecting to be dazzled by my children's performances and politely bored out of my wits by the other classes. Funny how that works.

5. What's with all the LAUNDRY? How many times a day do people in this house change their clothes?

6. Everytime the Rosemary Clooney song "Christmas Memories" comes on, I always go through the same pathetic five step process:
1. "What the heck is this?"
2. "This song is lame."
3. "Oh, it's this song." (combined with remembering that she is also George Clooney's aunt. )
4. "WAIT! OH NO! THIS SONG MAKES ME CRY! TURN IT OFF!"
5. "Too late! WAAAAAAAH!"

7. I think that Blogger might have lost its mind - all of my posts now have tons of links to posts that are NOT linking to them, and I also received a google notification about 7 people linking to me who did not, in fact, link to me. How disconcerting.

8. Yes! Rosemary Clooney was George Clooney's aunt - she was his father's sister.

Mmm! Coffee with syrup!

If you follow me on Twitter - which I don't particularly recommend. I lead a dull life and never is it more glaringly apparent than in what I choose to twit - you'll know that I had an unplanned trip to the hospital yesterday. I'm okay. Moving on!

My Kitchen Party post is up today, and it's all about my weekend - aside from the medical stuff, which I am JUST TIRED ABOUT - and our current ice storm and ALSO about my upcoming Christmas dinner marathon of cooking, which I really need your help with. See you over there!

Ho Ho Ho, Who Wouldn't Go?

Here is the Christmas music playlist!

SeeqPod - Playable Search

I did my best to find a good representative of all of the songs and singers mentioned, although I probably missed a few. If you think of anything else to add, let me know!

And I have a brief but poignant post up at Five Minutes for Parenting today, all about how sick I was - but am not anymore. Now I'm fine. Go read my post!

My Favorite Christmas Songs, 2008 Edition

Some people are churlish about Christmas music, and actually I am often one of them. I actually went up to the counter in a local restaurant and asked that they turn off the radio when "The Christmas Shoes" came on, and I'm actually feeling some residual nausea right now just thinking about it. Actually.

And then there are the self-serving vanity projects* of famous people who decide that they should release a Christmas album, since people will buy anything this time of year and all. So I'm actually pretty grouchy about most Christmas music.

*hahahah! It is funny for a blogger to make fun of self-serving vanity projects.

Not all of it, though. There is nothing better than a good Christmas song, and I'm pretty much listening to Christmas music NON-STOP right now. And without further ADO (what does that even MEAN? Thanks, Julie!), here are my 5 favorite Christmas songs as of this very minute right now:

1. That Was The Worst Christmas Ever! - Sufjan Stevens


Okay, admittedly this is a pretty melancholy song but it's pretty and who DOESN'T have memories of a tense family Christmas? "A Tense Family Christmas" would be a good name for a Christmas album, now that I think of it.

2. Baby, It's Cold Outside.
Aw, c'mon! This is such a fun song. (and two of my kids like to sing it together, which practically KILLS me. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW CUTE THAT IS.) Here's a nice version by Leon Redbone and Zooey Deschanel.


3. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas - Judy Garland

Not ONLY was this from possibly my FAVORITE movie ever, but it's also young Judy Garland singing the most heart-breakingly grown-up Christmas song I've ever heard.

4. Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home) - Darlene Love

Soaring and awesome.

5. Santa Will Find You - Mindy Smith

Aw! Such a pretty song!

Okay, so that's my current Christmas favorites list. What are your favorite Christmas songs right now? Let me know and I'll make a big Christmas music playlist out of your suggestions.

The Baby and I are in the middle of making a gigantic batch of gluten-free gingernaps, which are very, very tasty and also are making my house smell all spicy and molasses-y.

They're cooling on a big clean tablecloth right now, to her delight, although we've both sampled enough to tell you that they are VERY, VERY GOOD.

HERE IS THE LINK TO THE RECIPE!

Brrr!

It's a BILLION BELOW today! SO cold!
Anyhow. I have a warm post up at The Kitchen Party today, complete with angelic crafty pictures. See you there!

The Feast Of Saint Nicholas

Here's the Hot Chocolate Recipe!

1/4 cup cocoa (not hot chocolate mix. Just regular old unsweetened cocoa powder. You knew that of course.)

1/4 cup sugar

1 2/3 cups water

1 large can (well, the recipe says "large", which means the regular sized can) of Carnation Evaporated Milk*. I do not recommend using the skim kind, although you could if necessary.

Measure the sugar and cocoa into a medium saucepan. Whisk it together. Now stir the water in and then stir in the Carnation.

Now heat it up.

Ta da!

It's VERY good. I watch for Carnation to go on sale and buy it in large quantities - my Grandma would buy a whole tray of it and keep it on the floor of her pantry, which really sounds like something I should do. On special occasions - like today! - we spritz some spray whip cream onto the top and sprinkle that with some crushed candy canes, although it's PLENTY good on its own, too.

*Hello, Carnation people! Biggest fan here!

My camera died right after I snapped one picture of my children's hands as they were just about to grab their boots this morning, but that's good enough, I think. So I don't have an updated Pancake Picture, which means you must make do with last year's:

Hee hee hee. I make AWESOME pancakes. This year's pancakes didn't have the banana eyes - we just skipped right to green M&Ms, but otherwise...

My kids are very happy.

A lot of people have said - or written - that Christmas is already hard enough, and that they really don't need yet another thing on their to-do list. But something that I think is profoundly true is that shrinking all of Christmas down to one day actually increases the pressure on everyone, and the pressure on Christmas day itself, hence the Christmas afternoon letdowns and meltdowns. Spreading the joy throughout the month of December and into January not only respects the ancient rythyms of the Christmas season but it also makes everything much easier - nothing needs to be perfect if there is lots to look forward to, and the season itself feels much less frenzied if Christmas is more than just one morning.

Off to relax with a book for a while. Have a wonderful weekend!

Saint Nicholas

Tonight is the Eve of St. Nicholas! The kids are going to set out their cleaned winter boots at bedtime, except for The Baby, who is going to set out her wooden clogs. St. Nicholas brings Kinder Surprises - the most European candy easily available to us (and so now my children think of Europe as a wonderful place where milky chocolate comes filled with frustrating toys. Magical!), black licorice, gold chocolate coins, and stickers or markers or something like that. Oh, and always, always mitts. Tonight, we're going to have a hot chocolate party - our regular hot chocolate (the good kind made with a can of evaporated milk), topped with whipped cream and crushed candy canes and a plate full of speculaas and the gluten free cookies that the kids decorated after school yesterday and sing some carols. It'll be great.

We've all had a stomach bug over the past week and it's hard to work up the energy to do ANYTHING. I find that we're generally sick on the holidays and there's a part of me that would just like to coast through them, to do them in the easiest, least-effort way possible. But I do find that the more effort I put into holidays, the more fun they are - and I'm not talking about effort spent on things like baking 39 different kinds of cookies in one day or making my house look like a magazine, but the effort spent on thinking up ways to make things feel special and fun for my kids. Sometimes, though, I would just like to coast. I'm sick! I'm tired! I've had an extraordinarily stressful week! Surely they can live without St. Nicholas for one year, surely I do enough already.

Last night, I decided that I'd had enough of moping around, and made some popcorn for the kids the older two and I were sitting around watching a Christmas show and I was listening to The Baby and my husband sing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer while she splashed around, and you know what? I felt this intense, pure happiness, this utter golden contentment. My house looks like it was decorated by a six and a nine year old (BECAUSE IT WAS), we all are recovering from a stomach bug, times are uncertain and we're broke and I think my body has gone nuts - and there I was, totally happy.

There's something sort of smug and mean in writing about happiness, but look: I am not a good person. I'm lazy and grouchy (and let's not forget smug and mean) and prone to crippling bouts of self-pity and if I can be happy, it must be within reach of pretty much anyone. And right now, I feel anticipatory glee, thinking about tomorrow morning and my kids barreling down the stairs, their predictable delight at finding mandarin oranges and candy canes, my pretty children and the childhood that I want to give them - and the childhood that is well within my reach, should I just get off my butt and do something.

And it is only when I manage to wrest my attention away from my precious self for a few minutes, when I actually focus myself on actively making other people happy that I am suddenly truly happy myself, as happy - maybe - as a very, very old man who has come all the way here from very, very far away, and who is smiling as he reaches down to put new mittens (again!) in a sleeping child's boot. Tonight.

No Worse Then It Ever Was

I have always wanted to name a kid Flannery, an idea which makes my husband groan in a discouraging sort of way. When paired with my last name, Flannery sounds sort of like a cart driving over a bumpy road, as well as not being a name that's heard much outside of Southern Gothic circles. I like these things. I also like the name Malachy, although my husband always points out that we're actually not impoverished Irish people in a Frank McCourt book.

FINE THEN.

At the church thing on the weekend, a friend tried to make my husband hold her COMPLETELY ADORABLE BABY. He demurred, thus foiling our evil scheme to have him suddenly overwhelmed by the baby's complete and utter cute-itude. I also considered smuggling her baby out of the door under my coat and making a break for it, but changed my mind when I remembered that I am too good looking* to go to jail.

*I'm just kidding. I'm pretty average.

I know a lot of pregnant people right now. What's up with that, people I know? Is it the tanking economy? The bizarre turn for the completely terrifying in Canadian politics? All I know is that I start hanging out in a group of local women and suddenly get a big queasy from all of the progesterone in the air.

I wish I was pregnant right now. I think it's because I'm hand-frettingly scared, worried over things that I can't fix, and I crave pregnancy, crave the silence it brings to my mind, suddenly shrinking my world down to food and sleeping and a little watery passenger. Do you know that I have never written a single word while I was pregnant? Not one (beyond emails to my grandma), this sudden abrupt end to days spent writing. I can only create one thing at a time, I guess. But my babies are not that safe in me and my pregnancies have been precarious ships that reached land safely after stormy voyages and I do not know that I have the courage to ever be pregnant again.

"Do it now if you're going to," warned my doctor, as I head deeper into my 30s.

I wrote earlier this week about the tiny ancient coin that is now my husband's after a long and bizarre path, and here it is:

If you look closely, you can see a fortress stamped into its surface, the vain hopes for security and safety in a world that was crumbling, about to vanish. And beyond that, you can see my mortal hand, the lines that mark my path through time, the blood vessels pulsing just below the skin. Someday, someone else will hold that little coin in their hands and marvel for a moment and than set it down and go about their day in a world that I cannot even imagine, this time that is yet to come.

Hey look! I'm making cookies with my kids at The Kitchen Party. See you there!