Crafty Coyote: The Christmas Edition

In an earlier entry I mentioned Christmas gifts--how I was making them, every one, this year, and how it would be dirt cheap. I mean, heartfelt and crafty, not cheap. Did someone say cheap?

Anyway, now that the holiday has come and gone, I can unveil to you my grand scheme for thrifty Christmas success. Here is a complete gift:

That's what they looked like, packed up and ready to go. The contents of one gift may or may not include one or more or none of the following:

A stack of hand-drawn greeting cards (blank white cards purchased in bulk--years and years ago--and decorated with calligraphy, felt pen illustrations and/or metallic gel pen highlights), attractively wrapped with hemp cord left over from the hemp craze circa 2001.

Origami ornaments. Remember the origami boxes I mentioned several times over the last month (usually in conjunction with Arrested Developement)? They're super easy to make, and I bet you could come by directions online. I made boxes mostly, though a few stars and snowflakes worked their way in there, and then threaded gold-braided ribbon through 'em and tied a little loop on one end so the whole thing could hang, attractively, from a bough.

Chocolate chip cookies! We can thank Ashley for the most amazing choc. chip recipe ever. These bad boys have uber-dark chocolate, milk chocolate, espresso dark chocolate and sugar-free Belgian chocolate in them instead of plain old Tollhouse (not that there's anything wrong with Tollhouse). I wrapped them in brown wax paper, tied them hemp and a calligraphied tag, and dropped them in the bag.

As for the wrapping, it's exactly what it looks like: brown paper lunch bags, with hemp cord and a gift tag. The gift tags were either hand-stamped or (an idea I blatantly stole from Erin--because it's absolutely brilliant--and therefore take no credit for but will definately use again) cut from leftover Christmas cards. The one shown was one of this year's cards that was sent to my work by another office. It's a gorgeous card, and now it lives on in an attractive gift tag.

Voila!

If you have questions or ideas, I'd love to hear them--especially the ideas. I had a blast making the gifts, and the best part was definately putting each one together for my loved ones. You know, designing cards specifically with my mom in mind, or trying to pick out the ornament that most reminds me of my brother, and so on.

I'm curious to hear what everyone else came up with for fun and thrifty gifts.

I guess it's cheaper than therapy

We're fresh back from Christmas at my dad's, where the event of the evening was my brother's brand new Wii (I got a Kitchenaid mixer in cobalt blue, which is stinking rad but a whole lot less fun for the whole family to enjoy).

Now, I've never been one for video games, not least because the controllers make my hands ache something fierce (I have a medical excuse for this, really), but the Wii is cool. I was actually able to play. We plugged in Wii boxing and went at it.

Watching everyone flail around was hysterical, and by the end of the first round, my dad and brother were both breaking a serious sweat. By the end of the second, they were red in the face and breathing hard, and these are both very fit, very athletic guys. My brother boxed my husband, my dad boxed my stepmom, I boxed my husband and brother--it was quality family time of the very strangest sort.

My first match ended up being against my husband, which was disconcerting because the characters are configured to actually look like the players, and Mitch's looked remarkably like him. But we got to playing--and I absolutely schooled him. Sure, he was still figuring out to block with the controllers and he won the next match, but I'm not sure he ever even landed a punch that first match--he went down and never got up. It was amazing, really. (I warned him that this bit of info was making its way to the blog, and he assured me that his dignity would survive intact.)

Let's just say that I'm not used to playing video games, and I'm definately not used to winning, so this, my friends, was a good night.

Order of Festivities

This year is busy as always, but somehow I feel like Mitch and I are finally getting the hang of this "four Christmases in three days" schedule. Our craziest year by far featured no less than five dinners within 24 hours (two Christmas Eve, three Christmas Day), none of which were our own, at our own house. Last year marked the first time we had our own stockings, and this year marks our first official Christmas breakfast--complete with guest. Our weekend looks like this:

Friday night. My dad's birthday dinner. We put 55 candles on an 8" layer cake and then lit them all. We call it the "birthday inferno," because it's just that dramatic--the cake radiated heat and everything, and when Dad blew them out he splattered wax all over the table. It was rad.

Last night. Carolling/dinner/candlelit liturgy at church. This was great fun, not least because there was a complete overdose on Christmas carols and an honest-to-goodness hayride through the York neighborhood. The church looked gorgeous, the food was delicious, the kids were adorable (and hysterically funny) as they sang "Silent Night" and "Away in the Manger"--also, I got to sing soprano in a quartet ("O Magnum Mysterium"). The whole evening was a whole lot of fun.

Tonight (Christmas Eve). Christmas at my dad's, with my aunt, uncle and two cousins. Food! Family! Presents! No birthday candles, though.

Tomorrow morning. Breakfast and stockings at our house. Eggs, grits and coffee are on the menu, and our friend Manis will be joining us for the morning. I mentioned that the cats have stockings this year, and I have it on good authority that Santa's bringing them Fancy Feast, bizzy balls and some crazy toy that looks like a huge fluorescent fur ball with arms. That should be entertaining.

Tomorrow midday. Mitch's family celebration. More family! food! and presents! This one seems to get bigger and bigger every year. The niece and nephew are back in town, so that'll be fun--I always seem to end up playing cars and hanging out with the little ones rather than sitting around having sophisticated adult conversation.

Tomorrow evening. Dinner at my mom's. This one marks the offical closing of the Christmas season with the last round of food, family and presents (and probably a Christmas nap, at some point)--it will be lovely.

So, that's the madness of our Christmas weekend. Mercifully, all our family lives close by so we don't have to brave the roads (though I did brave the express lane at Haggen's this morning, and that was equally scary), and I'm excited to see everyone.

May you all have a wonderful holiday! Merry Christmas.

The aforementioned stockings

(However, my mom did take pity on us this year and she quilted some beautiful new stockings for the bookshelf that have since replaced the Goodwill felt stockings. This picture was taken to accompany the earlier entry, but sadly was only just now uploaded onto my computer. I posted it anyway.)

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care...

...or not so much by the chimney, since we don't have one, but by the bookshelves, with pushpins. It looks really classy.

We've never been much for Christmas decorations, and yet we have several boxes full of things we've gotten as gifts, or that my parents didn't want but didn't want to throw away and so sent home with us. We have a tacky throw blanket with a picture of Santa on it, a creepy Santa mask, several "Our first Christmas ornaments" (this was the by-product of getting married right before Christmas--people felt compelled to commemorate not only our wedding, but also our "first" Christmas), two nativity sets and some cheap stockings I bought last year at Goodwill for 99-cents each and marked "Mitchimus" and "Theamus" in Sharpie marker--olive green for Mitch, and plum for me. (When people ask, I explain that "Mitchimus" and "Theamus" are our Roman names, which usually gets either an odd look or a laugh).

This year, I decided to go for it and officially decorate, since we have boxes and boxes of stuff going unused in the cupboard beneath our closet that ought to be aired out periodically.

I'd been toying with the idea of getting stockings for the cats (I come from families that include the pets in the stocking roster), but decided against it until I discovered, upon opening a box of decorations, two miniature stockings that I have no recollection of ever receiving or purchasing. I marked them "Gunner" and "J. Sparrow" and hung them, with pushpins, from the bookshelves alongside ours. It's precious, really.

Also, I put out one of the nativity scenes, though I stuck with only Joseph, Mary, Jesus and two sheep, because:

Nativity Set + Psycho Cats = Destruction

...and while I'd hate to see the holy family bite it (Mary has an outstretched arm that I'm certain will be first to go), I figure we can at least keep the wise men, sheperds and livestock tucked away safe for now. Nativity sets seem doomed to be broken, unless you have some sort of glass-fronted display case or very high shelf (we have neither), and I'm thinking they should just come with a tube of super-glue in the box so we might be better equipped to deal with disaster when it strikes.

(As I write, Gunner has been busted nuzzling Joseph in a curious, possibly aggressive manner. He is not supposed to be on the table, and he is definately not supposed to be threatening Joseph. For this, Gunner was awarded a squirt from the Squirt Bottle of Punishment, though I can only imagine what goes on while we're not home...)

Probably more than you wanted to know, but now I've told you

As you may have heard, I've been busy combining my book site with this one, which means I've had to manually go through and copy and paste every damn entry from one blog to the other. This has been a tedious process, but an enlightening one, as it's provided me with an opportunity to go back and read some of my earlier entries from both blogs.

Why enlightening? Well, it's interesting to have such evidence of the changes one undergos over the course of a year. Some of the sassy rants that I've posted over the course of my blogging career I find entertaining (yes, I'm the sort to laugh at my own jokes, it's true), but a lot of them express views that I no longer hold, or views that, alas, I never really held in the first place, as some were written with a specific audience in mind that might approve of or be irritated by whatever point I attempted to make. What I'm saying is: I noticed a trend in my writing of trying to impress whomever I imagined to be reading the entries. You, dear reader. I was trying to impress you.

Not the least significant of these earlier entries was the one I posted last winter about my attitude toward Christmas (The Birth of Santa). This was an entry that I was ambivalent about posting in the first place, since I didn't actually feel that I'd made my point, and didn't feel that I could without giving more personal info than I intended, or even wanted, to give--and so I left it as it was.

It's true that last year was a particularly stressful holiday for me, and I notice already that this year is somehow not. Being involved in a church has made a big difference, as we will be celebrating Advent for the first time ever, but I find I'm also getting excited about the holiday in a way I never have before. I ascribe a fair share of this enthusiasm to the fact that I will not be Christmas shopping this year. At all.

I mentioned earlier that I'll be making all my gifts, and I think this is helping to turn the season into a more meditative one--making gifts for nearly thirty people is peaceful and repetitive, particularly because I haven't put it off until the last moment.

Also, I'm excited to spend time with my family, to sing Christmas carols in church, to decorate trees, bake cookies and to not set foot inside a departement store even once. Already, I'm thinking this year will be a good year.

I'm not cheap, I'm "crafty"

This year is the year of the Thrifty Christmas. Generally, no matter how I try to keep things simple, handmade, heartfelt and cheap, I end up spending more money than we have on presents, and with a big ole happy (extended and extended) family like ours, that adds up pretty quick.

But this year, I've found a crafty little solution.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you what it is yet, because a lot of the people on the list read my blog. But December 26 will be the grand unveiling, and it'll be great. In the mean time, suffice it to say that making, wrapping and labelling upwards of twenty-five gifts has cost me less than $60 and offers the not inconsiderable benefit of being a gift that I actually think people might like. (Imagine that!)

The trouble is that I'll have to think up something different for next year--but I won't worry about that quite yet.

Book Review: HOWARDS END, by E.M. Forster

I picked up HOWARDS END purely because they have an awful lot of Forster at Henderson Books, and so I figured I ought to get on the ball and read some. I did, and was quite pleased--were I to describe HOWARDS END in one word, I might choose "delightful" ("clever" might work, too, but it doesn't sum it up quite as nicely as "delightful" does, so we'll go with "delightful").

What impressed me most about Forster was his ability to tease his characters without belittling them. What do I mean? Well, Tom Robbins, for example, is bad at this. When he wants to provide a little distance from his characters and have a little fun at their expense (say, in a satirical way), he manages to make me hate them. I've had the sense several times, while reading a Robbins novel, that he delibately tries to prevent me from ever empathizing with a character, because every time I get close he throws in some snide comment about the character's motive that completely turns me off--and then I start to get paranoid that he's attempting to sabotage any budding relationship that I might have with the character.

Which is beside the point, really. What I'm getting at is that Forster managed to play up his characters' flaws and quirks in a charming way that enabled me to see them as full, fleshed-out beings, imperfections and all, while still allowing me to like them. I love this. I really love loving characters.

Which is also a bit beside the point. The point is that I really liked HOWARDS END, not least because Forster's commentary on English culture in 1910 was surprisingly relevent to our culture today (there is a passage on Christmas shopping that particularly resonates). It is also a great book to precede the gi-normous heap o' literature that I'm currently reading, which is The Idiot, which so far is awesome. I'm not sure why, but reading the books in sequence (though they're utterly unrelated, as far as I know) seems to work.

RATING: 4

Book Review: THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER, by Barbara Robinson

As a kid, this was my most favoritist of all favorite Christmas books--right up there with the Scratch-N-Sniff Cookie Book. THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER is to holiday literature what A Christmas Story is to film, and I have to admit I was a bit nervous to reread it this year, after so many long years away: what if it was only a silly kid's book--the kind that, when returned to in adulthood, is dull and overly simple, that leaves the now-grown reader wondering what, exactly, was the original appeal?

I am happy to report that that was not the case. PAGEANT was as cute and funny and touching as ever, and I mean that in a good way: any book or movie with the word "touching" on the cover is usually right out, as far as I'm concerned, but in this case "touching" is somehow not bad, or cheesy, or revolting. Let me explain.

The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the Lord's name in vain and so the book begins. But when the Herdmans, through a series of events involving arson, doughnuts and a mad cat, get involved in the annual Christmas pageant, the stubborn little congregation, the narrator and her family and all the terrible Herdman kids get a new look at Christmas, because the Herdmans have never heard the Christmas story, and their questions and interpretations of the birth of Jesus shake up the church's predictable pageant and give everybody a peek at how things really might have happened.

Downright heart-warming, actually. I have to admit I got a little teary-eyed, which made my husband laugh, because I was trying to read the story out loud to him. Seriously, though--it's only eighty pages long. You could read it in an hour.

RATING: 4

Book Review: AN IDIOT GIRL'S CHRISTMAS, by Laurie Notaro

You may or may not have read Notaro's first book, The Idiot Girl's Action Adventure Club--I have not. However, I have read her third (?) book, I Love Everybody (And Other Atrocious Lies), and so I was familiar with her writing, a bit.

IDIOT GIRL'S CHRISTMAS is a collection of funny essays about various Christmases Past in the Notaro family, including the Christmas that Laurie ruined, and the Christmas where Laurie was labelled (twice! On two separate occasions) The Most Unfun Party Guest Ever. The book features six-foot high handmade lawn decorations, nightmarish shopping trips with Nana, and all the check-out line hysteria one could ever ask for. Personally, I loved the Great Christmas Tree showdown, in which Laurie left her tree up until March, just to irritate her already aggravated mother.

Notaro's writing reads, to me, like stand-up comedy. Incredibly conversational, slipping into italics and ALL CAPS, as she, or her family, gets more and more and MORE fiesty, the essays flow off the page as though they're being spoken, and that's impressive, but a whole book of it--wait, two whole books of it--gets old, and quick. It's like an overly long coffee date with a friend who recaps, though animatedly and interestingly, every mundane, mildly funny event that has happened to her over the past week (I know, I'm usually this friend--this is why I have a blog)--after about three-quarters of the book, I was feeling all "talked out", which was funny, because I was reading.

But if you're feeling all Christmassed-out, and you need your holiday spirits lightened, this is a good one--though I'd have to recommend The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson, first.

RATING: 3