Definitely on the Naughty List. Definitely.

Andrea from A Peek Inside the Fishbowl asked for this - three random shots from today. For me, random could have happened, but I was inspired to do this. Let's call it, "What I Imagine Santa Does on His Vacation".



Clarice IS a pretty good lookin' little deer.



Santa, you really should turn your head so you don't choke on your own vomit.



Bad, bad Santa.

Merry Christmas, if I don't post before then. If afterward I should have a few lumps of coal to tell you about, well, I might have earned them with this one.

Christmas Time's a Comin'.

It is so hard not to be crafty at this time of year. Inspiration is everywhere. Whenever I get a few minutes, I look around, grab something, and next thing you know, something is born of my imagination and whatever materials are handy. My own sewing basket has been AWOL for some time, and I couldn't resist this one from Winkel any longer:



I loaded it up with stuff - both practical and crafty like needles, thread, embroidery floss, useful buttons for quick replacements, scissors and felt for quick crafts with Josie; and when doing so I was inspired to make a little something:



What compelled me to grab buttons and make a snowman, I don't know. It's like the buttons spoke to me. What it is for, I don't know. A gift tag or a card I guess. But there went ten minutes of my life!

But, as you can see peeking out of the basket - I was also moved to go one step beyond and make another project. In the spirit of tacky Christmas greetings, I give you the card I made for Kari, the owner of Winkel, and her pug Hubble:



It still needs some refining - but recipients of crafts from people who conceive of and execute an idea all within the space of a quarter of an hour can't be too picky.

Buttons and Felt! Buttons and felt! What else could I do? And so, modelled by Dino once again, here is Brown Bunny:



Here he is having a tea party:



I am fully aware that he is funny looking and made without much care. But Katie was dying on Coronation street, and I was fending off a toddler by saying "Mommy can't pay attention to you because she is making a bunny for you". He was inspired by this ornament that Josie keeps pulling off the tree and snuggling:



I KNOW! How do I get from cute white mouse to brown bunny with a freak on? Why do I bother?!

Because when I'm not taking low res images of crappy crafts, I'm doing other things to get ready for Christmas which aren't as much fun.

As glimpsed in the photo of my new craft basket, I've hung curtains in the kitchen for the first time in the four years we've lived here:





The kitchen, which deserves its own post in regard to just how ugly the previous owner made it and how we dasn't touch it for fear of opening a whole new can of worms (and its deficiencies due to lousy construction sixty years ago), gets a lot of southern light through the tall window that doesn't open without a hammer. The hammering might break the unglazed single panes of filthy glass. We are replacing the windows in the house one or two at a time, and that one is next. For warmth right now and for the reason that once this past summer I sprayed some bug spray at it and now I can't open it to get to the part where it dripped down between the panes to clean it, it must be covered - for insulation and so it doesn't look gross when we have friends over on Christmas Eve. The other window faces our neighbours, and it too is in need of a cleaning although it's new and I can do it easily - it's just that it's winter and I don't want to stand on a chair outside to wipe the glass; and I don't want to pull out the fuzz clogged screens and wash them because I'm busy making ugly felt bunnies that Josie really doesn't want to play with. Yes, I'm busy washing and ironing curtains rather than cleaning windows to save time and so that I'm less aggravated. You understand my logic? Our house looks just great at night with the curtains closed and a few candles. You can see too many warts in daylight. After the New Year, I'm treating myself to a professional window cleaning. I think it will make me a nicer person, to look out of sparkly windows. And I ask the blogosphere, how the hell do other people keep their windows clean? Upstairs ones - if they're old and don't do that flip in thing like our new ones do. What did the people who used to own these houses do? I am perpetually amazed by how hard it is to maintain something like windows to a reasonable standard.

What else have we been doing? Well, last night it was watching Rudolph. You know, that show that tells you that different is good only when other people can benefit from it? The kids show with the horrible ending? Where the elf in Santa's sleigh is dropping toys with umbrellas, and gets to the bird who can't fly, considers giving it an umbrella, doesn't, and so he drops it and it plummets? (By the way, if anyone can tell us what's wrong with the Dolly, and how come Santa's elves didn't make these particular toys or what happened to the careers of the misfit toy making elves if that was the case, we'd appreciate it.) We were inspired to use our Rudolph and friends toy set, along with the little train set we bought:



We also made tunnels out of books for the train, practiced jumping over the tracks, lined up a legion of buttons all around the track, played tiddly winks with old buttons inside the tracks, and had a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to get Josie to eat cheese off the coal car while it was running around the tracks.

The little imaginary train passengers also need to be careful of the giant black panther that keeps pouncing and derailing it. Then, we yell at Boo Boo (the panther) "Boo, you're a nut nut!" which is the most hysterical thing ever if you're Josephine. It is so fun to call things or people nut nuts that we can giggle over this for a good ten minutes at a time - and sometimes we even have to call people like Grandma on the telephone to tell them they're a nut nut. If we add "big" to nut nut, we can practically get her to pee herself. Adding little to nut nut is also very fun, but not as side-splitting. The semantics in the nut nut game are incredible.

And so, we are amusing ourselves in this manner during the week leading up to Christmas. I hope to bake some cookies, clean one room each night after her bedtime to keep the house passably good looking for our Christmas Eve get-together, and thankfully I don't have much shopping left to do. In fact, I intend to head out right after the nap she's having right now, with a full supply of Rockets in my pockets (that's Sweet Tarts to the Americans), and finish up the last few things no matter how much screaming I have to endure, how much bribery, manipulation, begging and pleading I have to perform, how much sugar I have to push or how much wrestling and ignoring I have to do. And the public - I'll apologize in advance by simply saying, Josephine is a nut nut.

Holiday Decorating With Marla!

From reading my posts, you might think that I like quirky, silly, vintage things when it comes to decorating my home for the holidays. You'd be surprised if you saw the flower basket on the front of my house. It's full of natural greenery, twiggy things and folky wooden things. It's almost classy. See?



And then you look up, and realize that we live here, and of course there's going to be some tacky Christmas décor inside.



Surprisingly, putting up the tree and decorations went rather smoothly. I thought surely we'd have to take someone to emergency with pine needles in her eyes or that a squirrel would come out of the tree and the cat would bite the light cord and the rottweiller would chase everyone around and make a mess. But we don't have a dog any more, and we were sad. Especially when we pulled out the ugliest Rottweiller ornament ever. The one that we saw in a gift shop on a weekend road trip to Skaneateles, and said "Why aren't there ever any nice dog ornaments? I hate this one." and then on my parent's trip there a few weeks later, my mom saw it and said "Isn't this cute!", bought it and gave it to us. (It's too hideous and sad to show.)

See what I get? I think, "Ooh, we have a toddler. Something unusual or interesting might happen when we put up the Christmas decorations."

Nope.

Of course she was more excited about climbing in the empty boxes. I had to coerce her into cute photo-ops, and take what I could get.

Here I made her kiss the tree ("Kiss it! KISS IT SPORTSFANS!"):



Here she is watching Steve cut the end off from inside, with the door all fogged up and smeared with her hot breath and sticky hands, because we as resposible grown-ups know that todders and saws don't mix:



Here she is wandering around "helping" him to straighten the tree (because toddlers and sap and untethered heavy objects DO mix:



How many of us remember our own fathers in exactly this position?




Steve was kind enough to take her upstairs for her bath while I unpacked the ornaments. It was nice to have a peek at the breakable ones before they were packed back up and put away for a few years:



The vintage ones I collect are cute and not that fragile, and I'm not as sentimental about them as I am about the ones from my childhood. Those I love to see every year, even though Steve ridicules some of them. These are just some neat ones I found over the summer at an estate sale:



Santa and Mrs. Claus are my current favourites from my childhood collection. She looks so blowsy, and they're both so sweet together. I've had them since forever.



The bear on the potty (I know - what the...?) was my favourite as a kid. A bear! On a potty! A kind of potty I've never seen before, but it's a potty! A bear! For Christmas! And what is he doing with the red cloth that's not a stocking? Is it to wipe with?




This isn't one of my childhood ornaments, but I like him. He's an elf-type thing, and he's huge - the size of an adult's shoe. Steve HATES him on the tree, because he doesn't think it's an ornament. But I say the loop on his head makes it so. Next to him is a tiny "made in Japan" weirdo one - a child like creature with bells for hands, holding them up in a boxing postion (what the...?). Behind them are the dancing mice I used to play with under the tree when I was four or five years old. They have the toothmarks from my childhood dog Seamus studding them:



There are a few I've made. One year I got crafty, and made a half-dozen or so three-legged kitties, in honour of Homey. Some were gifts, and one I kept.



One year I made Hank Williams ornaments. Classy ones, of course.




The tree gets topped with a vintage child's cowboy hat - with a star on the front, because I like stars on a tree top more than I do an angel. We did this before Josie came along, and now it seems sweeter. The tree has a vaguely western theme, with rusty tin stars my dear friend Mary made for me (drove for three hours in a snowstorm to find the rusting chemical at a hardware store just because I coveted hers so much) and this year I put the plastic cacti from a string of lights that used to be in the kitchen (I got fed up with washing greasy kitchen dirt off them all the time) over some of the bulbs.



This charming picture of father and child under the tree is not as touching as you might think. No, Steve is vacuuming, and Josie is "helping", which she was more excited about than the whole decorating and holy crap there's a tree in the house thing (Thinking - "There is more stuff to vacuum more often now! Cool!").



Then, we (I) proceeded to decorate the rest of the living room/dining room. Our stockings were hung. Mine was made for me when I was quite young, and is unfairly huge for the person whose responsibility is to stuff it. To give you an idea, it would fit over a toddler's head and down around her torso, not that I tried (hard). Josie's was a gift from Grandma Joan, from Lumiere, a cute little store that is joining the fight to gentrify our neighbourhood. Steve's is an old thing I found at an estate sale, because he never had a special stocking and I won't let him hang one of his nasty every day socks there. He would love to make it look like all he has is a skinny tube sock because he is SO abused around here, but I can't have that happen.



The bookshelves get a few vintage tsotchkes - I love the very very old chenille trees and mica ornaments. Do you see those blurs? The toddler's hand? That's why there's a "Christmas crap my mom gave Josie" shelf with things she can play with.






There are also the special Christmas books that come out once each year.

Robert Earl Keen's book and CD are great fun, with fantastic crafts like the tampon angel, cigarette star, and the aerosol snow bra:



There are the beautiful vintage and repro-vintage books I like for Josie:



And the stupid dollar-store ones my mom buys. In this one, Santa appears to be getting a "hummer" from the reindeer (big night indeed!).



And the family favourite - the ALL ABOUT MARLA book:



I make sure we read it every year - as a reminder of how special I am. Or was, since it's so not all about me any more.



Hahaha! It is truly a piece of crap - it's a horrible story, ugly book and the names of friends, pets and places are all so far in my past that I'll have to spend hours explaining to Josie just who Terry, Gabby and where Angle Road was some day. So we look at it, laugh at the whole vanity industry, and move on.

I created charming vignettes with other decorations. There's my tasteful, thoughtful, meaningful feminine side:



And Steve's flashy, tacky, rock and roll side:



Guess which side Josie likes best? Of course. Thirty times so far today she's climbing up to grab the "Elvie" ornaments because button pushing (literally and figuratively) is where it's at these days.

We also decorated our liquor bottles on the top of the bookshelf, because the festive season can be rather stressful, and there are more excuses to drink at this time of year. Why not make them seem more approachable?! (Hey Santa if you're reading this, my Maker's Mark is at half-mast! But if some Weller's Centennial should happen to be available to pour down my chimney, I wouldn't complain either!)



I still have to find homes for some of the other vintage stockings I like just because they have cute designs:



And for my collection of graphically pleasing vintage Christmas cards:




And for Rummy Claus.




AAAAAAAAAAAAAH! I KNOW!

He's scary! And, when you pull his tie, he gives this phlegmy, wheezy laugh: "Ah HAH hah haaaah. OH ho ho ho ho. AAAHGh hagh hagh ho. OOOOh hacgh hagh ho ho hogh.", sounding not unlike any neighbourhood wino you might find at the Tasty Chicken House on Queen East. I found him at the now defunct Ziggy and Zon's in Buffalo fifteen years ago. He was on a shelf, without a package. When I brought him to the counter, nobody there had ever seen him or anything like him elsewhere in the store. They had no idea what to sell him for, or how to do so. They said to just take him away, and quickly please. But I felt like I needed to pay something for him, so I offered them $5 for coffee and left. He works on either three batteries, or one, if you put it in crooked. No matter how many or how fresh they are, he still sounds like Foster Brooks. He is truly a prize. It wouldn't be Christmas around here without him, and he is useful for scaring toddlers: "If you don't stop touching that, Rummy Claus is going to sleep with you tonight! Now let's read some Bukowski."

And so, since today it is skin-hurtingly cold outside and I don't care to leave the house or see that my toddler socializes - it's all about ironing a few things, giving the kitchen a good wipe down and making a nice soup involving many root vegetables and lots of butter and cream. And if the toddler doesn't eat some, I'll sic Rummy Claus on her.

More Holiday Crafting With Marla!

All of the nice posts out there (you know who you are) talking about nicely decorated trees and doing projects with the kiddies make me feel like I could be doing a bit more to get with the holiday spirit. Well, you all aren't worried about disappointing strange six-year olds, are you now?

But of course I've made a few feeble attempts to get festive!

Dino, who has recovered nicely from DiaperFest 2005, has been pressed into service modeling these Christmas crafts:

Pipe Cleaner Candy Canes!



I bought two packages of pipe cleaners (that's chenille stems, if you're nasty), in red and white. I imagined a little tree for Josie, with lots of cute candy canes filling it out since she only has her first ornament to her name at this point. I twisted them into about fifteen candy cane shapes before I got bored and put them away because I was tired of the toddler making them soggy. At $6 plus taxes for the supplies, that means each candy cane cost me 40 cents - with labour and aggravation, make it about $2.37 each. It is so economical to make your own crafts.

Clove Pomanders!



Back when I had all the time and energy in the world, I used to take navel oranges and stud them with cloves in beautiful patterns, tie them up with gorgeous ribbons and then present them to friends in charming vintage and antique bowls. Now I do clementines, with whatever string-like things I find around the house, and keep them because I need to cover up toddler and pet smells; and because every clove pressed into the citrus flesh is a stolen moment. Each whiff is a breath of memory, and I fear that if I get any busier, I'll have to make do with kumquat pomanders. It's the small luxuries that make my life special these days. That, and the toddler grabbing sticky spicy oranges and rubbing them into her eyes and crying .

Greeting Cards!



I took away all of Josephine's crayons except for the red, green and metallic tones, and gave her some blank cards to scribble on, taking those cards away when I deemed the artsy effect was finished. The results are not unlike what a monkey would achieve, but I'm hoping the relatives will be charmed. Of course, I'm not telling them that I pre-selected the colours and coached her through it with the intensity of the Great Santini. We all know she is a brilliant, talented child with a great sense of what's aesthetically pleasing, but occasionally she needs a little guidance. Where would Ashlee and Jessica be without Joe? (What - happy and normal and embarassed less often? You are so mean!)


Paper Snowflakes!

I love cutting out paper dolls (okay, elaborate paper monsters) and snowflakes. Papercutting and silhouettes used to be one of my hobbies - I found it very absorbing and loved seeing what shape the paper took. Much like it's believed that the famous Chinese jade carvers would see a shape in the jade and only carve away what was needed to reveal it, a handful of dust remaining - I believe the paper tells me what the snowflake should look like. Of course, these days it's hard to hear what the paper is telling me over the toddler repeating "Only Mommies and Daddies use kissorzs" and poking what I'm cutting with a sticky index finger. So I just cut as fast as possible, and think, what a cute picture it'll be - Josephine peeking through a lacy snowflake.

But of course, as the adage goes, you can cut out a paper snowflake, but you can't keep it in one piece and make a toddler sit still and peek through it for a cute picture (What do you mean it's not an adage? I'm making it one.).



Deck the Dinos!



Okay, this has nothing do to with Christmas. She's just a little weird sometimes and I had to share.

Garbage Tree!



Okay, this has nothing to do with Christmas either. I'm just a little weird sometimes too. To torture Steve (in a nice way), who pulls garbage duty, I like to make creative piles with the upstairs trash. It's up on top of a bookcase so Josephine can't get to it, and it gets sorted into recyclables downstairs - but I like to make the pile really precarious. You can't see in the picture, but there are lip pencil shavings scattered on some of the horizontal surfaces, and inside the can is a lot of crumpled paper that I could squish down so that everything could fit in the can if it had to. Steve admitted that this week's pile is spectacular. It's unfortunate that I have plans to go out tonight, and I won't get to hear Steve curse while he deals with it.

Jingle Cat!



Boo Boo is kind of a jerk these days. He spends most of his time in the basement, where he tends to his stash of broken crayons and Josephine's socks, and fills his litter box with copius amounts of waste that make me think I might cut back on the kibble. He appears in the mornings just in time to lick the yogurt and muesli leftovers from Josie's breakfast, then goes back downstairs to sleep and store up energy for bouncing off the walls all night long. We can hear him scrabble around the house, and if we don't shut the bedroom door, he comes in and claws his way along the underside of the mattress, then sticks his face in mine and purrs like I should be happy to see him at three am. Then, he'll go and try to curl up on Josephine's beanbag chair next to her crib, and since that makes rubbery noises he hates, he'll spit at it and go and bat one of my hair elastics around for a few hours. So I don't mind that when Josie catches him, she gives him great big hugs and squeezes and dances with him meowing along to Jingle Cats. It's a fine trade-off in my eyes.

This weekend we hope to get the tree and pull out the decorations. Of course that means something might happen that's worth posting about. See you next week!