Garden-Bed Christmas Tree, Number 3

It's ok if you laugh . . . I don't know of any other suburban family who habitually cut their Christmas tree from their garden bed!  We also have no idea how two fast-growing pines were growing in this garden bed to begin with, but they have been very convenient!  Here's John cutting our first Christmas tree in 2009.  In 2010 we didn't put up a tree because Gemma had just been born and then we left town for New York.  Last year, we cut the second tree, and I thought that it would be our last free tree . . . but branches from the 2009 tree grew back quite splendidly, and so the tradition continues!

Sizing it up . . . 

Hmm, this little piece?

Daddy's little helper . . . 

The tree, and its conqueror!  

(and I think there's a smudge on our camera lens!)

(Yes, definitely a smudge . . . )

As it turns out, it's our tallest tree yet!  It works wonderfully with our very high ceilings in the living room!

Thanks to our families, we have many pretty and special ornaments now.  

Six of our nest wedding favors made it home with us, so I stuck them in the tree.  They need candy or something . . . hmm.

With family coming to us this year, it does feel a bit more like Christmas and less like we're just pretending.  :)

A little late, but . . .

Merry Belated Christmas!

This year, John's side of the family decided that we should all do a homemade Christmas!  I was quite excited!

Thankfully, store-bought gifts weren't officially outlawed, because I'd already started my shopping when this announcement was made.  But our gifts for our Mom and Sisters-in-law were completely homemade. 

I made them these "helping hands" (apron-dish towel-pot holder hybrids which I found via pinterest. (The tutorial was from here, but the pattern pdf's don't work.  Thankfully, I found pictures of the patterns here and was able to sketch them myself.  They're quite simple!)

They turned out nicely.  I'd like to try making one again from terry cloth, as the tutorial alternatively suggested!

Inspired by this blog, I also made lemon curd using her recipe!  It was easy, delicious, and actually yielded enough to fill five 8 oz. jelly jars, with some to spare! 

Oh, and there are sooo many other things on pinterest which I would have loved to have made, if only there had been more time.  I propose another homemade Christmas for next year, yes? 

A Tree of Great Sentiment

Last week during Gemma's birthday party, John went out to the garden bed and chopped down our Christmas tree.  :)

It was the neighbor to the tree we chopped down two years ago. At that time, it was only waist-high.  Now, it stands probably close to eight feet high in our living room!  I can only imagine how it would have looked if we'd left it growing.  (It does seem odd to plant such a tree in a raised bed amid small bushes!)

So, once again, we have a happily real (and free!) Christmas tree in our living room.  With Gemma's birth last year, I didn't decorate at all.  The church sent poinsettias which I lovingly gazed upon while nursing my newborn, and we traveled to New York for Christmas itself.  

This tree is unabashedly wild.  :)  Somewhat bare and scrawny, it is nevertheless no longer the first Christmas tree of a couple of newlyweds.  Then, we merely stuck our tree in a flower pot of dirt and dangled it with decorated cookies, but this year I actually bought a tree stand at Target.  It is so scrawny that only the innermost branches are strong enough to hold our growing collection of ornaments!  So many people love us . . . Gemma has at least three ornaments of her own already, and we have about as many couple/family ornaments joining the gorgeous Lenox and Wedgewood pieces my Mom-in-law has divded up among her daughters-in-law.

 This one will always be one of my favorites, though, because John gave it to me at that first Christmas.  The person in the mall who sold it even put our intials on the snowman and woman's mittens.  :)

And there are a few of those cookie ornaments which I coated with nail polish and saved. The most precious is this little heart, on which I piped "Our Baby," only a couple of days after we learned that our first baby was lost.

There's the upstairs tree, too.  It's a little tree I bought at a garage sale during my college years.  It has traveled through life with me from dorm room to teacher's desk to the sewing machine in the window of our first home, and it makes me happy.

So, these are our trees this year . . . both capitalizing on sentiment, like sentimental me.  :)

O, the Holly and the Rosemary

Thanksgiving came and went without me expressing publicly my gratitude for many other things . . . our home, our church family, our Savior, and my arms, to name a few.  I probably would have never thought to thank God for the use of my hands until this year. 

But now it's December!  It's time to put away the few autumnal decorations (which I never shared with you!) and decorate for Christmas!

Years ago, I remember admiring a little hand-twisted wreath in the window of one of my great aunt's apartments.  This year, I wanted to hang wreaths in all four of our dining room windows.  :)

So, when we were in NY for Thanksgiving, my dad cut down a big piece of grape vine, and, with Gemma on my back, I started twisting.  The first couple of trials failed, but the next four were satisfactory.  :)

And then, when we got home, I gave our holly bushes a hair cut . . . and our rosemary a haircut . . .

 . . . And with some time, and a bit of ribbon leftover from our wedding, we had four beautiful wreaths to hang in the window!

 I love them.  I love the old-fashioned feel our dining room has.  I love that they were free and that they're made of real materials.  I love that they represent the swamps and forests of my former home and our current home on Cottage Lane.  :)

There were enough leftover holly trimmings to make a little Christmas centerpiece from a crystal bowl full of oranges . . .

 . . . and to spruce up the mantel for Christmas . . .

Soon comes the tree . . . :)

One Dolly Named Ann

 

I've had "Raggedy Ann" on my list of blog ideas for a while (yes, I occasionally have a list . . . I am a nerd!).  When I had purposed to write about her today, I found it kind of ironic that my cousin Missy also posted about making dolls in her blog yesterday!  Hers are stunningly beautiful, unlike any I've seen.  Mine is a classic redone, and only redone once so far by me :-).  She's the one whose face I posted about in mid-December, and I happily was able to finish her in time for Christmas.  After so many hours of loving labor, she was hard to give away.  Yet, when our darling four-year-old niece opened the box and exclaimed "my dolly!" I was quite happy.  And I'm certain that in years to come, she'll realize that this dolly had a lot of love poured into her. 

My mother made me a large Raggedy Ann doll for the Christmas when I was almost three, and she is still at my parents' house.  I was using the same McCall's (I think) pattern and dug her out to examine some of her clothes in my sewing process.  The poor doll has stains where I fell asleep on her and (so romantically) drooled on her face as a child and is torn in places.  Perhaps worst of all, she smelled of mildew thanks to her long hibernation in the basement.  Mom told me recently that she washed and mended Raggedy Ann, and I'm looking forward to seeing her again. 

In the past, John and I agreed that we don't know why parents take naked pictures of their kids.  I can see wanting to preserve bath-time memories, but only if there are enough bubbles to make the pictures modest.  So, when I expressed my desire to take a picture of Raggedy Ann without her dress "because she's so cute!" John groaned and replied, "This is how it starts!"  Funny man.  Anyway, there you have it.  I think she's cute. 

P.S.  John and I do communicate, and he occasionally also reads my blog.  Thanks to yesterday's post, wholesome deliberations over our dining room's paint have already begun.  :-)

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

It's been a while, and Christmas has come and gone in a flurry of travels and family time.  Besides busy-ness, it's been a time of sorrow for John and me.  But, to quote hymn-writer George Matheson,

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

Personally, the"rainbow" line always irked me as either pre-adolescent or 1970s.  John says I'm not allowed to judge like that since I wasn't around in the 1970s.  :-)  But the rest of the words are true, and more true for me now that I've felt them.  Our sorrow has not been without joy, and as much as I do not wish to stop up the natural-flowing grief, neither can I close my heart to the joy which comes but once a year.

As a side note, since this blog is technically public, I'm still going back and forth about how many life details to disclose.  You think that only your closest friends will take the time to actually read what you've written, and then you get random comments from Timbuktu, which must be representative in nature . . .

Here are a few snapshots from our first Christmas as man and wife, some already shared. 

Our tree, trimmed with its white lights and gingerbread.  Maybe I'll actually do the cranberries next year.

Christmas was a time, joyfully, of sewing for me.  It was Heidi's idea to make new stockings for the family since some of them were getting rather shabby and neither John nor Harvey had one.  It was an exciting project!  We used all fabrics that Mom had in the house, from wools to denim to upholstery, with red velour and cotton batting for trim. 

It was loads of fun to mix textures and styles. 

 

We had remnants of flannel Scooby Doo fabric, which we had to use for Harvey's. 

Mine's the pink one, of course, with John's beside.  :-)

Heidi wanted to do something special for Mom's, so we cut up a bunch of squares and made it patchwork.  We trimmed it, like mine, with an old lace belt.  Yay.  And yay for fun, easy, repetitive sewing.  :-)

Mom and Dad's Christmas tree, decked by Heidi's skillful hand, was gorgeous and rather put ours to shame.

More another day.

Embroidery and Rice Custard

A Christmas project for a special four-year-old niece of ours, whom I'm assuming isn't old enough to be reading my blog.  ;-)

Comfort food.  :-)

Our Gingerbread Cottage

O Christmas Tree!

Today we got our first Christmas tree!  Now, some people buy a potted Christmas tree and plant it after Christmas, but we did things kind of backwards. 

Here's John wielding the "big toe cutters."  :-)

Yeah, John decided he didn't care for a tree planted amid bushes in one of the flower beds, so we chopped it.  My only desire was for a tree and a real tree, and getting to chop it ourselves makes it even better.  :-)

I wore my boots, even though it's 70F outside. 

 

 

All ready to go!  I potted him in dirt in the large pot which held the artificial plant in the dining room which I brought to Good Will this week.  And now he is in the living room, awaiting white lights, a cranberry string and gingerbread.  :-)

O Christmas Cookies!

Saturday was the day, finally, for some Christmas baking.  I had the motivation of an assignment to make cookies for the monthly luncheon that a group from our church hosts for the international students at our local university.  But I already knew what kinds I wanted to make!  I've had Grandma Reid's gingersnaps on the brain for probably over a week, when I realized I'd have to get some molasses before trying them.  Somehow hers always seemed rounder and puffier, even though I followed her recipe exactly.  Maybe I'll try my own mother's trick of the trade next time and cut the butter in half.  (And maybe I'll actually use butter . . . I did use shortning this time, against my better instincts, but wishing to produce a genuine Grandma Reid gingersnap!) 

We received a pizzelle maker as a wedding gift from a wonderful pizzelle baker at our old home church and this seemed like a great chance to try it!  I could hardly believe that the recipe called for 3 teaspoons of vanilla!  My mother doesn't have a pizzelle maker, so this was a true experiment, but thankfully our instructions were very detailed - just a teaspoon of batter on each half of the iron, clamped shut for 30 seconds, and then gently lifted off and left to harden.  They came out well and tasted yummy. 

John even had rose-tinted plastic wrap in the drawer!  I think it's more likely that it was in the house when we moved here than that he bought it himself.  :-)

And ALL my cookies got eaten at the luncheon, which is a dream come true for every potluck-contributor.  :-) 

Getting in the Christmas Mood

Frankly, it's been a little challenging to get in the Christmas mood today with the weather in the 60's.  But, since today was shopping day, I went to Walmart and picked up a few pretty things.  This evening, with Christmas music playing on my phone (thank you, pandora!), the decorating began. 

I have to admit that neither of these ideas with lights were originally mine!  For now, our fire place is merely ornamental, so I made it a little more ornamental by strewing lights over the wood inside.  It literally took about 5 seconds.  John's opinion on the effect is that "it works," which always means that something looks good.  :-)

I LOVE how the kitchen looks with lights!  I wedged push pins into the joints between cabinets to pull the string taut and keep it at the front edge of the cupboards.  So fun.

I picked up this gold-glittered "peace" ornament at Walmart, too, without any particular design for it until I got home.  Sticking it onto the wreath (which also came with the house!) took, again, literally five seconds.  Yay.

Now, I think I'm officially in the Christmas mood.  :-D