late Christmas ornament post

Life got in the way of making timely posts in December (as well it should! so I make no apology).  In between finishing up a bit of homeschooling, decorating, cooking, Christmas shopping, crafting, posting reminders of homeschool activities/field trips to our Unschoolers of Memphis yahoo group and Homeschoolers of Memphis Eclectic Message Board, taking the girls to see the Tennessee Shakespeare Company Southern Yuletide performance of The Gift of the Magi and Other Christmas Readings, to see A Christmas Carol at Theater Memphis, on a backstage tour of The Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis, along with walking through The Peabody Hotel, seeing the Peabody ducks (that swim in the indoor fountain), lunch at The Little Tea Shop on Monroe (a Memphis lunch tradition, where prices remain reasonable, corn sticks rule, 40+ years of customers' drawings decorate the walls, and local lawyers and judges have "their" tables where their sweet tea is waiting for them when they get out of court), a trip to Memphis City Hall to straighten out a pension issue of my mother's (where my mild-mannered 18 year old fencing daughter said "oops, I have 2 knives in my purse" and about got cited for carrying an illegal knife -- illegal in that it was over 4 inches long!!?? -- in to City Hall -- I guess that's one of those homeschooler learning gaps: the girls aren't terribly cognizant of security checks) -- well all of that just didn't leave a lot of time for uploading pictures and composing coherent posts.  So, after that summary of our busy December, here are some pics of the ornaments I made this year.

And thus concludes the Christmas Season of 2011.  So many treats left unmade, so many activities left undone . . . .

New Year's Dinner

Dinner for New Year's Day -- less bound to family tradition than Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners, but an opportunity to delve into cultural heritage cooking -- more "roots" or folk cuisine.  I like to immerse myself in the folk essence of a place -- what makes THIS place unique or interesting.  Food is one of those pathways into the essence of place.  Here in the south the New Year tradition involves pork (a favored meat of farming cultures through most of the world), blackeyed peas, rice, and greens.  But the way these elements can be prepared and varied and mixed up is infinite.  It's a very fine line between Hoppin' John, Jambalaya, Jump-up Rice, Jolof Rice (there even appears to be a visual linguistic connection between the names).  So I pull out several cookbooks to concoct my own version.  These are three that I used:  Desperation Dinners (the name says it all -- quick get to the point easy to use recipes, and it has one for an easy Jambalaya);  Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home (great vegetarian cookbook, every recipe a winner, and it has a recipe for blackeye peas called Cajun Skillet Beans; and Kwanzaa, An African-American Celebration of Culture and Cooking, which is full of wonderful recipes of the African Diaspora lands.

So I take elements from several recipes, using both blackeye peas and dried purple hull peas from the garden, peppers and tomatoes frozen from summer harvest, lots of herbs both fresh and dried, along with onions, celery, some shrimp and some smoked sausage.

Some greens (I think it is some malabar spinach and some swiss chard) from the freezer, cooked kind of low and slow with some onion, garlic, a bit of hot sauce to finish off and a chopped hard boiled egg on top.

Plated up with the rice to catch the juices, a salad with orange slices and pomegranate and a home made roll.  Yeah, it was pretty tasty.

The Great Quarter Experiment

Sometime back before the beginning of 2011 I read something somewhere about someone (hmm, this may be where pinterest comes in kind of handy) who saved every quarter that came into her possession as change for a full year.  At the end of the year she had over $700.00 saved.  Sounded good to me, although I suspected one actually had to spend a lot of money to garner $700 in quarters in change.

I was curious as to how we would do on such an endeavor -- modified of course to accommodate our thrifty (cheap?) lifestyle, since we don't have spending situations that generate change every day.  So, every week this year on each Sunday we dumped any quarters we had as change into a large jar.

Now, on New Year Day 2012 we have tallied the results:  $71.00

After an initial let down that it wasn't $700, or even $100, I thought this was pretty cool -- I didn't have to "work" at it at all.  I didn't have to deprive myself of anything, did not even consciously try to "save" quarters through the week -- if there were quarters at the end of the week, they went in the jar, if not -- no biggie.  I started wondering how much money we would have had to have on deposit for one year (like a CD or Money Market) to earn $71 at the current interest rates offered -- about $25,000!!  So not too bad, considering we "earned" that "interest" on money spent on groceries, occasionally eating out, magazine purchases, trips to Target, Hobby Lobby, etc.

Linking to Masterpiece Monday at Boogieboard Cottage

The Littlies Came Today

We had Christmas again today when our oldest was able to come out with our two grandchildren.

Aydan after he looked in his Christmas stocking and opened 80 piece wooden train and tack set.  He lo-o-o-ves trucks and cars and trains and anything with wheels.

And Ari looks pretty happy with her goodies, too.  So does her mom.

I think they like having their pictures taken.

Looking for more, under the tree.

Our daughter wanted a picture of all three of them by the tree.  We had a fun and fairly relaxed afternoon before driving them back to their home (in a not very good part of town) before it got too dark.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all!  Tonight we go to the Christmas Eve potluck/open house at my youngest sister's,  joined by her husband's parents and siblings and their families, as well as my parents and other sister, her husband and their grown daughter who lives in London.  My 18 year old will be going to a party with her boyfriend, who is here on Christmas break from attending college in Pennsylvania.  Then tomorrow night we have the big Christmas Day dinner here at our house, with my parents along with the visiting sister, her husband and daughter, our 14 and 18 year olds, and the boyfriend.  Monday, our oldest daughter will make it out here with the two grandchildren (4 and 2), and we will have a mid-day festive meal of some sort and the little people will see what Santa left for them here.

The 18 year old has already departed with the boyfriend and his family.  The 14 year old is with my visiting sister, her husband and their daughter, along with my youngest sister's 8 year old daughter (yes, it's true -- my mother had only sisters, 2, I had only sisters, 3, I have only girls, 4, and both of my sisters with children only have girls -- our 4 yr old grandson is the only boy in the family aside from spouses!) riding the trolleys downtown, checking out the ducks in the fountain at the Peabody along with the decorations, and seeing Sun Studio if it's open.  I guess since niece Katie took up residence in London, she's decided she needs to see Sun Studio.

This will be the first year our #2 daughter has not been here for Christmas, since she moved to Austin last summer and came here at Thanksgiving to move the rest of her stuff.  I'm sure there will be many changes to our Christmas routine in the coming years as the girls get older and even move away and as we juggle multiple holiday events with other families and schedules.  With the aging of my parents, the venue of the main holiday dinner and present opening has shifted from their house to ours.

In the meantime, the roast is (hopefully) thawed, the stockings are ready to be stuffed, the presents are wrapped, the significant portions of the house are reasonably cleaned, and following my KISS program of holiday coping I have a box of crackers, a sliced brie log, and a jar of spicy tomato jam from my pantry for the potluck tonight, so I am relaxing with a cup of chai (maybe I'll have two!), and reading some mags the rest of the afternoon.  Merry Christmas to all.

Peaceful Evenings

I don't care for a lot of busy-ness, especially at night, and most especially during the winter and holiday season.  Above you see my idea of a pleasant winter evening's occupation indeed!  A visit to the village of Cranford, with a cup of decaf coconut chai tea in a proper cup with saucer.

Almost as relaxing, is the cd I have playing while I do this post:  Sting's "If on a Winter Night".

linking to:
Show off your Cottage Monday
A Return to Loveliness

Christmas Dining Room

The Dining Room is the first room we always decorate for Christmas, because the Dining Room tree is the one on which we hang the small wooden and felt ornaments from the Advent Calendar given to us by my parents when our oldest was quite young.  The box itself is cardboard, but it has held up fairly well over the past 20+ years.

This tree has ornaments that are either home-made or evoke the natural world, in either their nature (apples) or their material (natural fibers, bark, wood, etc).

It has no lights, other than 4 tiny candles (one for each child) that fit in candle holders that clip on the trees.  I'd love to get some small LED candles to put on the tree, but I have yet to find any.  You can see one of the candles in the picture above.

One year I saved egg shell halves, spray painted the white ones gold (kept the blue and green shells from my chickens natural), hot glued some ribbon around the shell half and filled with tiny dried roses from my garden and tiny berries and pinecones from Hobby Lobby.  I gave sets as gifts, but saved a few for myself.

There's an ornament made from old silk ties and rickrack that covers the pinheads where the pins secure the ties to styrofoam ball, and a picture of my oldest when she was 4 yrs old at a "trike-a-thon", holding Abba, her stuffed yellow bear that she kept until she left home.

We even put on the natural wooden baby rattle that my two youngest played with when they were babies.

The paper bird was part of a set of 12 that I made that hung from a mobile for many years, long since dismantled and now the birds hang on the tree, alongside colored and glittered butterflies glued on to sticks that the girls made in years past, and sand dollars picked up on trips to the beach (very rare to find whole ones where we go).

This was a little wooden box with three compartments that some snowflake gift toppers came in, that I covered with paper, some chipboard letters and glitter.

A quilt that my husband's grandmother made probably some time between 1920 and 1950 serves as a tree skirt.  The girls used to love to play with the woodland animals below which only came out at Christmas.

Home-made Christmas cones hang from the chandelier, along with felt elves.  When the girls were young the cones held treats for New Year's Day.  You can glimpse the Christmas Village on the buffet.

Why are there no pictures of the dining room table?  Because it's covered house refinance papers, boxes for lights, miscellaneous garland, some mail, a hat and scarf, and other things that desperately need to be put away or otherwise dealt with.

linking to:

Masterpiece Monday

Show Off Your Cottage Monday