Lovelihood

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.

Our coarse kosher salt may not be optimized for salt dough activities. But we make do, because it's the only kind of salt we keep in the house. As opposed to the twenty varieties of sugar stocked in the cabinet. Priorities.

I decided to get a little fancy with the marshmallows this year. Which gives me license to make them half the size as previous years' and package them in smaller batches. So there are the peppermint candy-topped ones (which, frankly, came out odd-looking), and then these babies, painted with a bit of melted chocolate and sprinkled with crushed graham crackers. A perfect, no-fuss s'more. www.lovelihood.com

For the past week, I've been parading through the kitchen all manner of baked and otherwise sweet goods, off limits to The Boy both for their Christmas giftiness and their highly allergenic qualities. He has expressed his unhappiness. Today's marshmallow preparations yielded a beaterful of the good stuff, sticky and gooey enough to satisfy this treat-deprived rock star.

Spent the morning pressing those carved blocks to fabric, which is more forgiving than paper, but sheds off miniscule bits of lint that eventually obfuscate the finer lines of linoleum blocks.