Christmas Moments

I have decided as the years have gone by that Christmas is just too big for one day, so in my house, we consider it to be the entire month of December. It takes the pressure off. I don't have to worry about having the perfect Christmas Day because I've already had a great Christmas.

My Christmas moment for today was when my two eldest daughters - 15 and 14 - voluntarily went together to deliver Christmas cookies to the neighbors. This is lamb and lions lying down together sort of stuff - or more lioness and lioness given how strong willed they are and how poorly they've been getting along. That simple event has made me happier than any material gift could. They were doing something nice for me and for the neighbors and they did it together without fighting.

We've been dealing with lots and lots of ice here near Boston. It snowed and then it sort of sleeted/rained and then everything froze. This has been a problem for me because I drive a huge van - a giant, I can take the whole soccer team to the game van. Yesterday, I got stuck on the ice in the driveway of the day care! My husband had to come with his Jeep and pull it out with a chain. Today, we got stuck in a parking spot in front of the doctors' office. It took a good bit of shoving to move it! That's to say nothing about the piles of snow that I keep getting hung up on when I try to turn corners! I am in serious need of some above-freezing temperatures.

I am also in need of finising my new hat that I'm knitting out of some wonderful sage green Malabrigo. It is in the foliage pattern from Knitty. Fingers crossed that it will fit, since I had trouble with guage. I went down two needle sizes and it was still a little big. I may just get to find out how well lace felts.

With Christmas coming, there are a lot of packages coming to my house since I did much of my shopping on line. I was delighted when one of those packages turned out to be for me - from Lisa, my SP 9 pal in Saratoga. Through the exchange, we became good friends and we recently met in person in Boston. Her family was relieved to find that I'm not a serial killer. We had a great time catching up, talking about knitting, and of course shopping for yarn. What she sent me was incredible hand spun yarn in delightfully complex colors. One skein is yellows, whites, greens and blues and the ohter is blacks, golds, purples and greens. I look forward to knitting with it someday. For now, I'm going to keep it on my desk so I can enjoy looking at it and touching it.

I also got in those packages thank you yarn from a friend in Australia who came to visit last Christmas. Her name is Gay, but she is best known as giggles for her propensity to giggle. She took a year long leave from her job as a chef on a cruise line to travel the world and landed for awhile in our neck of the woods. It was a hoot to have her around. She's a good cook and she kept the children entertained with her accent and exotic words. She said it took her awhile to get around to sending a thank you - given the contents, I didn't mind at all! She knows I love to knit and that yarn makes a knitter happy.