Lovelihood

Tucked in with the Christmas goodies delivered to our porch today was a card bursting with a sampling of specimens from my parents' yard. That's a Christmas card I can get behind.

To fill the void that shipping out all the Christmas presents left, I cast on a jumble of stitches to make what I hope will be a quick hat. Nevermind that in the process of sifting through yarns and needles in various drawers and in-progress bins, I came across a dozen temporarily abandoned projects left to languish on needles I'd forgotten were part of my repertoire. Among the ranks: a sweater I started a decade ago in style that is no longer mine, a couple of scarves for The Mr. that never progressed past the cast-on, and a hat for some mystery recipient I can't quite place. So I've probably got no business starting a new knit, but, clearly, I have a history of ceding to knitting compulsions I can't realize.

Bear, known to hover around chess matches and abscond with unprotected rooks, was indulged with a game of her own. She played by her own rules while The Mr. played by actual ones, and she came to a quick checkmate. But she accepted defeat with the grace of someone who was happy just to be in the game.

Final touches on the gifts and then I'm handing it off to The Mr. for shipping, which I'm expecting to cost an arm and a leg. Because it always does. The gift tags got a fancy treatment with some hardware this year, and were printed on our brand new printer which, never having had fabric and children's fingers and cereal boxes fed through its rollers, still prints like a dream.

There are many awesome things about having a kid in kindergarten. Having him bring home amorphous, and not a little bit ghoulish, kiln-fired objects is just icing on the cake. www.lovelihood.com

Turquoise and yellow and two shades of pink and the alloys one can create with those colors (around here that would be purple and more purple) do not perhaps comprise the most yuletide-evocative pallette. I would have settled for some glitter to liven things up a bit. But around here, we work with what we've got. And so a confetti array of salt dough ornaments, it is.

While we may be in a remarkably dry stretch of near-winter, the weather has turned treacherously cold, leaving a brittle dusting of frost along the hill we climb to get to school. We've been promised a mild winter, though, so this may be the whitest our Christmas gets.