Free Pass Friday

G recieved a lovely, if not disconcerting, corporate gift yesterday. Over the years business acquaintances have sent gift certificates and the ubiquitous "tower of treats", backpacks and bottles of wine. Yesterday, however we recieved our first official LobsterGram.

A fresh surf n' turf dinner will be flown to the Cabin when we call and request it. This is a lovely gift for obvious reasons: it's a fresh surf n' turf dinner. It's disconcerting for other equally obvious reasons: these are live Maine lobsters, and all I can think of is the Land Shark.

A mysterious voice will call from outside the front door: "Telegram". "Lobstergram".

Furthermore, I have never had the distinct. . .ahem. . .privilege of dropping a live two pound lobster into a pot of boiling water. The Lobstergram also comes with fresh lemons, clarified butter, steel shell crackers, seafood forks, lobster bibs, and "moist towelettes". I get the clarified butter, but "moist towelettes"?? Aren't these the same accessories you get with a kid's meal from Kentucky Fried Chicken? Now all I can think of is a life size Land Lobster holding a KFC bag full of butter and wet-wipes.

Tonight we leave for Grandma's house for Christmas. I called Grandma and said. . ."How about surf n' turf for Christmas Eve? It's on us. . .but you have to answer the door."

Let it Snow

Frosty the First

Over the weekend my sister-in-law told me about an old Farmer's Almanac tradition: the date of the first snowfall is also the number of snowfalls you will have during the season. The Cabin has a definite Farmer's Almanac-esque quality. Like this snowfall prognostication, what the Cabin lacks in sophistication it makes up for in folksiness.

The first snowfall here was on November 30th: barely a skiff of the white stuff, but snow nonetheless. We were in Peoria, Illinois the morning of 11-30, and saw the first snowfall there as well. Unprepared as we were for the weather, I sent the girls out in their pajama bottoms with gallon-size Ziploc bags over their tennis shoes to build Frosty the First.

Snow is falling again this morning, and I say "Let it snow!". . . two down, twenty-eight to go?

ERB

Cards from the Cabin

The last of my Christmas greetings have been posted. . .or will be as soon as our mail carrier, Mike, picks them up out of the box this afternoon. I love Mike. He calls me by my first name, and if I happen not to be home when he attempts to deliver a box or something requiring a signature, he always swings back by at the end of his route to see if I have returned. Note To Self: bake extra cookies [anything without Seven Layers] for Mike.

I typically address all of my holiday cards on Thanksgiving day. I don't like turkey and don't usually watch football, so it gives me something to be thankful for. . .all those lovely friends spread out across the globe. I got all but about seven cards addressed that day, and told myself I would finish the rest in a couple of days. Well. . .a couple of days turned into a couple of weeks and I just addressed those last seven this morning. In so doing, I revealed my utter lack of social savviness. Specifically, most but not all of my "in-town" friends were addressed on Thanksgiving. Well. . .you know. . .friends talk.

So last week, while out for a few glasses of holiday wine with a group of in-town girlfriends, one of them called me out about their not having "made the cut" on this year's Cabin christmas card list. I mumbled something about turkeys and football, and made another Note To Self: address cards by geography, not alphabetically or some other arbitrary means of organization.

ERB

*^%$#@ cookies

This was me last Thursday:

Although I was wearing a cult-of-the-housewife apron like hers, I was not nearly so pleasant. Probably because I wasn't making cut-out sugar cookies shaped like gingerbread houses. I was making these *^%$#@ Seven-Layer Cookies from Epicurious.

I try a new holiday cookie recipe each year. Last year I made Cafe Brulot cookies, which tasted like Spanish coffee from Huber's in Portland. The year before I made Lovely Lemon tassies from Cooking Light. But I think I may have set the bar a little too high with the seven layers of intense almond and "sohisticated" apricot. Epicurious promised a treat with a "cosmpolitan air", but forgot to mention the frustration of creaming almond paste endlessly and gently folding in egg whites and seperating dough into three equal portions and baking impossibly thin layers of pastry and simmering an apricot preserves reduction and tempering high-quality dark chocolate. OK. So they mentioned all of that in the recipe. . . but I didn't read the recipe before I picked this cookie?!?! All I was thinking of was the fact that the layers matched my vintage wrapping paper frames, and that the Cabin could use a little "cosmopolitan" this Christmas.

Screw cospolitan. Next year I'm making cornflake wreaths again.

Dear Santa. . .

We believe in magic. Not a dungeons and dragons deep magic, but the kind of magic that is created when love and energy and optimism and effort converge around an idea or belief. We create our own reality. And so it will come as no surprise that write a lot of letters to Santa.

When Mom and I cleaned out her guest room closet last month, she surprised me with a pile - a huge pile - of she and my uncle's childhood books. Most of them are Wonder Books from between 1949 and 1956. But among them was an eight-inch square little volume published in 1967. She remembers receiving this book as a Secret Santa gift, maybe in college or as a first-year teacher. The title page reads: "These letters were selected from the thousands of letters, postcards, scribbled notes and Christmas cards sent each December 25th to Santa Claus by young boys and girls who still belive that without Santa there just isn't any real Christmas".

Well. Emily and Caroline can't get enough of this little book. To tell you the truth, neither can I. The letters appear in the children's original handwriting. We read a few each night at bedtime. I am going to begin sharing them here, in hopes that you believe in magic as well.

Good thinking, Ira. When you really need some information, you should always go straight to the source.

OK. This one is my favorite. I think that if I knew Robert, he would remind me a lot of Caroline.

Cheers!

ERB

Peace, love, and paper scraps

The handmade holiday decor goes on. Know what my favorite elementary school art project was? The magazine collage. Classmates brought discarded magazines from home, and from them we clipped images, words, and phrases, and then affixed them to construction paper in an arrangement that refelcted "ourselves". I once abused the magazine-collage-art-project privilege by pilfering all the pictures of Greg Louganis.

Anyway, I still love to clip up the mags, and yesterday made this tag to embellish the otherwise bah-humbug fresh swag I had picked up at Whole Foods last week for the Cabin front door. The flocked deer stickers were a crafty superstore splurge.

Peace and love this holiday. . .I wish each of you could swing by the Cabin front door.

ERB

Business as usual.

Caroline just made a pet pig entirely out of masking tape and declared that they were going to visit the North Pole together. They are out on the porch packing their bags right now. I don't usually blog in real time. . .but I didn't have anyone to call with this breaking news.

Free Pass Friday

I extended the handmade pledge to include not only gifts, but decorations as well. Fortunately, I have been blessed with crafty and creative friends for several Christmases past. Two years ago, a special gal was kind enough to wrap our family's gifts in a variety of utterly fantastic vintage wrapping papers. After the girls had opened their boxes, I scavenged every scrap from every package.

Equation:

[Vintage wrapping paper scraps + Mod Podge + Unfinished wood frames + (glue x glitter)]

+ B/W Photos =

Handmade Holiday Decor

Cheers!

Like riding a bicycle.

Just when I'm ready to throw in the towel. . .start buying plastic stuff with too much packaging, drive to class rather than ride my bike, crank the thermostat up to the 82 degrees, and guzzle generic soda made from 100% genetically modified high fructose corn syrup. . .my ReadyMade comes in the mail. And I am soothed. I fall in love all over again with my Cabin, my time consuming hand made gifts, my bread machine, and my fair trade wool socks.

The article "Poster Children" in the current issue features the work of five artists, asked by ReadyMade to "reimagine the populist poster art of the first Great Depression". This print by Nick Dewar is my favorite of the five.

I rode my bike to class again this morning, testing the minimum temperature threshold of my winter gear. The cold air in my face, and the holiday decorations emerging along the route made me think of Christmas in the sixth grade. I found a purple 10-speed under the tree, and headed directly out for a ride up and down snowy, icy 85th Avenue. I have the scar tissue to prove it.

Mr. Dewar has certainly got it right: Simplicity - such as the childish joy of bundling up for a midwinter bike ride - is the key to successful living.

ERB

Run, turkey, run.

If I remember correctly, the Pilgrims and the Indians feasted and celebrated their thanks for three days. So if focused on the historical accuracy of the holiday, these greetings are not so belated. . . the party may have just died down last night.

On Thanksgiving we criss-crossed the state in Illinois. Early in the morning we drove to a small farm town to the east for a brunch with G's grandfather, aunts, uncles and cousins. We ranged in age from 90 to due-in-two-weeks. After brunch we pointed the wagon train west again, to Peoria for dinner with G's parents, his brother, and our nephews.

Two years ago we followed this same route. I will never forget that drive. There were not many cars on the interstate, and G had burned a disc of Christmas oldies-but-goodies. It was just the four of us in the car on a happy, snowy, holiday morning. At one particular stretch of the drive, we could see not another vehicle in front or behind us, and we were passing through a small thicket of leafless cottonwoods and poplars. And then we noticed him, running at full throttle down the side of the road: a splendidly plumed HUGE male wild turkey.

This is not a bird often spotted from an Illinois freeway. In fact, I had never seen one before, and have not seen one since. But there he was on Thanksgiving morning. . .running for his life down the shoulder of Interstate 57.

Warmest holiday regards,
ERB