a father and pup re-u-u-nion is only a motion away...

Will we have a white Christmas?  Only flurries so far...

...with just a tease of accumulation...

...and back to bare ground within a few hours.  I love a good snowfall, but it's all right - in these cold, dry days, we have amazing heavy frosts.

Most days are bright and sunny, which makes that beautiful morning fog.

The small front pond stays frozen, so I make sure to have fresh water available for our outdoor friends.

Sometimes I have company on my morning jaunts.

Claudia has a nice padding of fat and an extra-thick coat, but she's not immune to the cold.  When stationary, she's constantly lifting one foot, and then the other.  Cats can easily get frostbite, so this helps a bit.

Some of my other companions are a bit more shy.

Covid life around here is pretty uneventful, for the most part.  An escaped pup-and-dad reunion provided a bit of excitement...

...amid our generally sleepy days.

We've finished our Christmas prep, although we haven't quite kicked into high gear for the season (look out, December 18th!).

Christmas lights are up...

Mantle is decorated simply, with a felt mistletoe garland and some red ornaments.

The cats are loving the tree.

Between steady work days and cozy nights by the fire, Christmas lights merry all around us while we work our way through the best season of ER, it feels pretty perfect.  It will be sad without friends and family this holiday season, but I have a feeling that we'll be able to have a pretty satisfying time.

Have a good week!

a rush (of activity) and a push (of frosting)

It's the time of year to pull out all of our favorite Christmas decorations!  They were boxed up last year, so it was nice to see some old familiar faces...like these guys.  I hand-cut these Star Wars "snowflakes" for Todd in the early years of our relationship.  A good reminder that I will never, ever indulge in paper cutting by hand again!  #ouch

Our decorations aren't fancy, and they never match.  Some of the interior lights are colored, some are yellow, and some are white.  They line nearly every interior window and are fairly tacky-looking...but I love Christmas lights and I don't care.

We didn't get a tree this year, but have two smaller evergreens that were pressed into service.

All of our ornaments have some significance and many are handmade, like these hanging over our fireplace (we're just starting to build the fireplace frame, so for now this old window is hanging on the wall itself):

I hand-stitched that vintage coat and cross-stitched the Nordic glove, and they are very dear to me...as are these two:

One signifies all the strays that we feed (this particular stray is Clothilde), and the other has Oregon on one side/Indiana on the other...our home states. The others are mostly store bought, but each one means something, so I wanted to hang them up, tree or no tree!

I *love* tiny Christmas trees and put them everywhere...red bows, too.

I love, love, love paperwhites in the winter, so of course I have a little teacup-full in the living room.

At night, with the fireplace on and the mismatched Christmas lights blazing, with the ornaments swaying on their strings and the little trees and pops of red bows and red flannels everywhere, with our cheerful plaid stockings looped over the ends of our bed frame and hanging over the stair railing...it feels very festive indeed! 

I made a Christmas cake for a party this weekend but got no good photos of it.  It's a standard white layer cake with vanilla frosting, but I cut up some waffle cones to serve as pine trees both on top and against the side of the cake. I ran out of time for careful decorating but I think the overall effect was nice:

After covering just one tree, the star icing tip stopped cooperating and no matter how hard I pushed on the bag, only strands of frosting shot out. I gave up and looped them around the trees in a pretty haphazard way.  It was only when washing the tip that I discovered a piece of butter lodged in the end - argh!  Well, now I know, and this information could be useful for when I make this cake again...and I definitely will.

The weather's been chilly overnight but rather mild during the day.  Each morning, the sun warms the light frost, making a pretty little shower over the eaves of the barn.

The cats luxuriate on the heat pad...

...and we watch birds on the tree outside the living room windows.

Sunrises and sunsets have continued to be amazing!  This is our back yard with the sun just coming up.

I like to enjoy these little pleasures in the midst of a very busy time.  Christmas sales are hopping and there's always so much going on this time of year, with first Thanksgiving, then my birthday, and then the few frenetic weeks until Christmas itself.  I love holidays, but I'm always glad for the post-holiday lull, which usually means lots of pajamas and soothing television/favorite books. 

Until then...have a great week! 

It's beginning to look a lot like...

It's December!  Although I've been lackluster and disorganized some years, this year I have been on point with decorations.  This has been kind of a lousy year, so it feels nice to have good things to celebrate. 

Plaid tablecloth and mini "Christmas tree" made out of leftover pine boughs?  Check.

Christmas tree up and decorated?  Oh yeah.

I love our ornaments.  We each only have one or two from our childhoods.  The rest have been cobbled together from thrift stores, are homemade, or bought with intention to signify "an event" in any given year.  I love all the little animals we've bought over the years, the metal bells, the tin stars.  Almost no ornaments match, but the tree just feels like "us."

The mantle is punctuated with red (Todd has a stocking, but it's on the other side!)...

...and if a side table has room for a Christmas display, it's got one.

We have red and white/tan Christmas "banner flags" over all the windows, and golden snowflakes on our kitchen cabinets...

Advent calendar on the fridge!

I even made two Christmas pillows this year.  You saw the quilted one from a few weeks ago, and the other is a badger cross stitch.  Thanks to water soluble fabric, I can now cross-stitch on anything.  Can you see the clear fabric that I've stitched on?  A few minutes in hot water and it disappears.

I decided to make it into a small pillow.  I think I may make it even smaller when time permits.

I've got red balsa wood snowflakes scattered in our bookshelves and red velvet bows tied everywhere.  I love how festive it feels.  In 2018, I'm planning to be much more intentional about celebrating EVERYTHING and changing up the house with the seasons.  But for now, I'll enjoy our Christmas explosion.  Cuddling up in the living room with our hand-made quilts, in the glow of our lights, is so, so wonderful.  Even the cats are getting into the spirit of it!  I think they enjoy using the quilts even more than we do.

It's getting a little cooler here, too.  We've had some beautiful nights...

...and cool, foggy mornings.

Seemingly keeping with the spirit of the season, the Japanese maple outside my office window is a gorgeous vibrant red.

We're not anywhere near what I'm used to with an Indiana winter, but we're going to dip down into the 40s this week!  It's wonderful weather for hiking.  We all love being outside in these kinds of temperatures!

Have a great week!