Thinking Ahead to Christmas

I have recently gotten hooked on Pinterest, and if you haven't looked into it yet, you should!  So crazy did I make my daughter on Facebook that she told me years ago I should get on Pinterest, because I would "like it better".  I acted just like her child and thought "She doesn't even know me.  I don't need to spend any more time on the computer than I do now!" THEN I started looking for ideas or recipes that I knew I had "shared", but couldn't remember when.  Looking back and trying to find them drove me INSANE.  How those people at FB manage to keep tabs on all of us is beyond me. I would not want that job, let me tell you.  But that's another story, and one I am in no mood for today.

Today I feel fall in the air and it's my favorite time of year.  It was Laura Ingalls Wilder's favorite time too.  Her daughter wrote that "it was a time of summing up, of taking stock, and being prepared for winter". I can't put it any better than that. I am going to have my beloved  Abigail Lea for a few days and she loves nothing more than donning an apron and helping.   Plus, Christmas is right around the corner and I have a problem with shopping.  Well, not shopping, but going into malls. I can't breathe in there and, well, the drive there and the parking lot is usually enough to make me want to crawl under a table and cry.  Or just sit in my car and while while I send the kids in with a list. hahaha. That's not really a joke. It's absolutely true.  This little Chromebook has been my best friend because I can "shop" at home.  This is my favorite part of the 21st century so far.  If you can't afford an actual laptop, I highly recommend the Chromebook for less than $200.  I got mine on sale for $100.  It simply surfs the net with the Chrome browser, which blows Explorer away.

Pinterest is a file sharing website that lets you "pin" ideas and directions to various cyber "bulletin boards" so that you can quickly and easily find them again.

Last year I decided to make handmade gifts and they went over so well that this year I decided to get an early start.

Today I went and got stuff to make several things for gifts that I think will go over very well.

Here is a list of ideas I got the supplies for today.

Vodka Cherries

I figure this will be good in a basket for younger people who still drink, occasionally, but are stuck at home on New Years.  Even people who don't drink might break these out with family in for holidays or, say, an ice storm or blizzard.  What better way to spend the time playing cards until the wee hours and nipping on some Vodka Cherries? Plus, they are so pretty I just really couldn't resist.  And for people who do still drink this is a classy no-brainer, my favorite of all gifts.  This link will take you right to the guy's blog, which looks really good.  I can always find it again by going to Pinterest and clicking on the picture of my Recipe board, which will take me directly to his site. Cool, huh?

AND, if you are surfing the web and, say, price matching, you get a little Pinterest icon so that you can click on it and save whatever you are looking at to any board you create yourself. So it's a great time saver when you don't have time to fully explore the site at the moment.

Buttons

Initials  I can't get a picture to load and this is actually an Etsy website, so you can 

just buy them, but they would be easy to make yourself.  I personally love and collect buttons. Some of my favorite memories as a small child are of going through my mother or grandmother's "button boxes".  These will be good for anyone who likes buttons, or just their initials, and you can match them to any decor.  So if you know a person who is lamenting over finding anything to hang on their walls in a color they can't find, this would work well.  Pinterest (and my boards) have lots of great ideas for buttons and you can buy them in variegated shades of the same color now, which is very good because I think saving buttons has fallen out of our collective memory. Which is a shame, in my book.

Coffee Scrub

This is an anti-cellulite remedy and several more are involved if you hit the link and scroll down.  This one will be for my friends who have been with me longest, through good times, bad times, cellulite, and the whole enchilada, so to speak. They know who they are and I am finding more all the time.  Blogging is a great way to get to know people. I highly recommend it.

Homemade Bath Salts

Homemade Bath Scrubs

I can't get the pictures to load but if you hit the links you will see lots of good ideas and I believe you will want to go to Pinterest and get started immediately.  It is a little addicting but every body's got something, and this is a benign addiction since it provides free advertising for any one's idea's or blog.  Once you get your boards set up, you can practically go to sleep just pinning stuff.  It's a boon to those of us who have big plans but small attention spans and bad memories and hectic schedules.  I am describing myself here, so take no offense but if the shoe fits, wear it proudly.  Pinterest will be able to simplify your life.

Last, but not least, check out these babies!

Homemade Lanterns

Beautiful Storage Jars

These are nothing more than empty spaghetti sauce or jelly jars cleaned up and made all fancy.  You can keep stuff in them or paint them, or even decorate with beading that you can find at Walmart in the crafts section for little to nothing.  One of these painted prettily plus a small string of lights or a battery powered candle and you have a great gift for very little actual money.   If a bracelet breaks, save all the beads!  This one has been a little uncomfortable for me, as I am now saving all my empty jars and running out of room....but it will be worth it! For the storage jars all you would really have to add would be a pretty knob at the top.   Fill it with a scrub and you are good to go: two gifts in one.

 I just pretend like Nana and Big Grandma are beside me, proudly glowing that I finally learned not to throw stuff away.  Something tells me I should have learned this long ago, but I'm still glad I don't have a whole drawer full of rubber bands saved from the paper and pieces of tinfoil that I have carefully cleaned, folded, and "saved".  In everything, moderation:  this is my motto. ;)

I miss the days when they would lecture me about this and then tell me what it was like to wear the same dress, made from a flour sack, every day for a year because it was all they had.  We would have had so much fun doing this together.  There is nothing I can do about that now, but I am going to try to entice my kids home for a few "down days" around Thanksgiving with the promise that we can make gifts together and even eat some Vodka Cherries while we work.  That, to the best of my knowledge, is how memories are made. If worse comes to worse, I will just breakout the Vodka Cherries, get them looped, insist that they can't drive, and pull out the empty jars, Epsom salts and essential oils and we will go from there.  Not that I advocate manipulation as a rule, but every mother knows that it does work.   We do what we have to do, and we are your MOTHER so suck it up and have another cherry, kid.  We are going to make you a sugar scrub for $3.00 that you will love, in a pretty, reusable jar!  Life does not really get better than this, I hate to be the one to tell you, and I know you won't believe me for another 25 years, but it's true.  Trust your mama!

Here's to making memories, homemade gifts, and be prepared for Christmas.  And Pinterest, naturally.

Little Altars Everywhere....Pt. 2

I was the first grandchild on my mother's side.  For three years I ruled the kingdom and during this time I proclaimed my grandmother "Big Grandma".  This was not because my grandmother was big.  In fact, the first time I called her that I can remember how she laughed for a very long time and finally asked me why I called her that.  She didn't seem especially touched by it.  I had two grandma's that lived in her town, as I thought of it, her mother lived there also, my great-grandmother.  The only explanation that I had then, and the only one that I still have to this day, is that my grandmother  was taller than my great-grandmother, ergo, "Big" Grandma and "Little" Grandma.  Little Grandma didn't seem especially pleased by her name either, but it seemed completely obvious to me.  I, being naturally shorter than either of them by quite a distance, did not know that they were both actually very small women.  Be that as it may, they were both referred to by those names from that day forward.  Nobody argues with the first grandchild, I tell you.  Nobody.

Big Grandma always had a bird nest on her Christmas tree.  She said it was good luck for the next year.  I can remember her getting excited about finding small abandoned nests.  She sprayed the holy living crap out of them with Lysol and put them in trash bags, to "kill all the bugs", for weeks and then shellacked them.  Probably to seal in the bugs, just in case any survived.  Or laid eggs that could hatch.  She did not suffer dirt, she put on a whole uniform including a scarf over her hair and attacked it mercilessly. 

It's not a real one.  It was a gift from my mother, in memory of the one Big Grandma had, for my own house.   It's the oldest tradition I have.

Big Grandma was very crafty, even artistic.  She was always whipping up something or other and there wasn't much space between us, which is probably why one year I made my own ornaments as gifts.  The Santa below is another of the cute wooden ones that move around, but to the left of it and below with the pink and blue swirl is one.  You simply buy an empty ornament and whole bunch of paint, pour it in, swirl it around, and waa-laa!  Beautiful ornaments that will last as long as you don't break them, but hey, that will just be the year you broke the pink and blue ornament that you made when the twins were small, and waa-laa!  There's a memory.  That's the way it is with Christmas ornaments that you know.  They never leave you.  This cannot happen with new ornaments.  Unless it's the only new ornament, in which case it will probably be special, in which case you could make a memory if you broke it.  But only if you cared about it. 

You can swirl any colors you want, in case you have a different "theme" going, or want to match your furniture or something.   However, if you make these please give them as gifts.  They will be treasured forever.  Unless they are sold at a garage sale.  

Another good use for the empty ornament is to put cute stuff inside.  Pictures, confetti, in this case golf tee's.... these are unique and one of a kind gifts, inexpensive to make, depending of course on what you put in them.

One of the Beautiful Redhead's, from her golf coach in high school and safe from garage sales forever and ever, amen.

If you knit, and I am ashamed that I don't, this is an excellent choice.  In fact, so ignorant am I that I do not even know for sure whether this is knitted or crocheted.  Probably crocheted.  Isn't that the one with all the holes?   Whatever it is, we should all learn to do it and I am pretty sure my Nana is rolling over in her grave right now because I would never learn this most basic skill when she tried to teach me.  I regret it.  It can't be that hard and I need to get that started.  It's been on my list for decades.  This one was given to me by a friend I worked with named Janet Turner in 1993.  I have put it on my tree every year since and I always stop and think of her.  I always thought I would do that for the kids every year, if I could......do that stuff, but I've not gotten around to it.  My babies are 14.  I need to get started soon.

They say no two are alike.  That is just one added plus if you are nervous about making mistakes in knitting. Or crocheting.  Maybe by next year I can inform you further on these mysteries.