'Twas the Day Before Christmas...

...and all through the house, Gege was crocheting, with a baby under her blouse...

Oh yes, my friends. Even though I've been crocheting quite a bit in the last few months (though not quite getting the whole "finishing" thing), I brought out my hooks on Christmas Eve because I was on a mission. An important Christmas mission to save our poor little Charlie Brown tree from looking entirely sad and dejected, not to mention naked. We had the lights. We had the bulbs, though not the hooks for the bulbs, so, you know. We had the lights.

We even had gifts. Or, at least I had some gifts. My Mister didn't because he was married to a Grinch this year who hadn't wrapped any gifts yet. She's just lucky there is something called "expedited shipping," otherwise she would have had a large I.O.U. to give her wonderful, thoughtful, Christmas-loving husband and then have to look at his large, blue eyes, brimming with disappointment, and feebly say, her voice cracking ever so slightly, "Surprise...? Heh...heh.... Ummmm...thank you for all the thoughtful gifts that you bought for me ages ago....yours are on their way....heh! Ummm.....Look what I can do!" and then try tap dancing, but since she has dance moves akin to Elaine on Seinfeld, she just ends up looking like a deranged woman in the midst of a grand mal seizure.

Ahem.

As I was saying. Something we didn't have was a tree skirt for our tree. However! I do have yarn- lots and lots of yarn and so, being the easily distracted innovative girl that I am, and to do some stash busting as well as show Big Mister that having a ginormous yarn stash is actually a good thing, I decided to crank out a Christmas tree skirt. In just over 24 hours.

A largish crochet project? With little time to complete it? And a grumpy, hungry baby to feed all day long, as well? Oh yeah, baby. BRING IT.

I actually started it the night before Christmas Eve, thinking I'd have loads of time to get a huge chunk of it done while Little Mister was sleeping. Especially since we still had some last minute shopping to do on Christmas Eve, including grocery shopping for the amazing Christmas meal that I had not yet planned. Hey- I thrive on stress and am so much more productive when I've procrastinated until the very last moment. Or so I like to tell myself. And I usually believe me, even though I know that I will usually lie to myself in order to make myself feel good. "Oh no, Gege. Of course breastfeeding means you can eat dessert every night without gaining weight since you're burning so many calories. Besides. Nutella and crumpets are healthy. Says so on the container."

I figured I'd use up some of my cotton yarn since I had quite a bit and, if it got too hot under the tree, it wouldn't melt like acrylic. Brilliant! Or so I thought.

You see, I've been crocheting an awful lot of lace weight stuff recently. I have just discovered lace weight and I'm in love, but I'll go more into that later. The point I'm trying to make here is that my fingers have gotten used to luxuriously soft lace weight alpaca and, as such, have become quite the prissy little digits. They scoff at anything so thick and blundering as sock weight, much less the hefty boorishness of worsted weight, so the choice of a worsted weight yarn was bad enough, much less that the yarn was also cotton. *shiver*

You see, crocheting with worsted weight cotton yarn is....oh geez. I can't come up with a metaphor strong enough to convey the torture my poor hands went through while trying to create a little Christmas cheer for my naked little tree. Crocheting with cotton is dumb. And extremely painful. And the fact that cotton becomes like a Chinese finger trap when it is wet making it near impossible to crochet with it at all, much less crochet quickly under pressure when your hands are so wet and clammy because you are afraid you set yourself up an impossible goal and yet you so desperately want some Christmas cheer in your house and so you are going to make this tree skirt RIGHT NOW because the Baby Jesus didn't complain about being wrapped in swaddling clothes, so stop complaining and work those fingers, monkey!

And so I crocheted with the stupid cotton. I could have stopped and used acrylic since I had all the colors I needed, but, what can I say? I'm stubborn and just a wee bit mental, so I continued on and on with the stupid cotton. Did I mention it was stupid?

I restarted 3 times the night before Christmas Eve because I couldn't figure out the right color combination I wanted to use. I had a lot of colors so I thought I'd use them all so that our little tree would look like it threw up a rainbow which was why it had no color on it's branches. But, it just didn't feel right. And My Mister said, "Well, it's nice, but it's not Christmas." So, I decided to do something much more simple- a dark berry red, black, and white to resemble a Santa outfit. Brilliant! (Truth be told, I was stuck on the rainbow throw up...it was My Mister who suggested the red/black/white combo because he wanted a tree that didn't suck.)

First try with a rose color- beginning of rainbow puke

Christmas Eve morning, I was out the gate with 10 rows (out of 30) down. (I'm making a 9-point star, or round ripple, but without closing it.)

Christmas cheer- can you feel it??

Then I had to take a break and go last-minute Christmas shopping (picked up some paperclips to use as ornament hooks, too- take that, Scrooge!), scare Santa, 

He has his mother's Christmas cheer. *wiping tear* That's m'boy!

eat lunch, and feed Little Mister a few times. I crocheted a little bit in the car, but still only completed 5 more rows.

15 rows down and a blister starting to form on my thumb. Hard core crochet, y'all.

Little Mister was having a Dickens of a time with his teething and was a complete Scrooge the rest of the afternoon. (HA! See what I did there??) Thankfully Big Mister was home so we could take turns pacifying the beast the poor little guy. However, since I alone have the ability to feed him, I ended up not having much crocheting time, no matter how hard I tried learning how to crochet with my feet.

20 down! THE REST OF MY LIFE TO GO.

By the end of the night, I had run out of the berry so I had to start the white a little earlier than I had anticipated. But, I ended up having 5 rows left when I started the white, so my OCD with numbers was appeased. 

I had to stop crocheting and wrap presents so that My Mister wouldn't have that sad, puppy dog look in his eyes as he looked at my ever growing pile of presents. Oh yes- that hard lump of coal where my heart should be had started to soften.

We woke up Christmas morning and I had only one thing on my mind- NEED TO FINISH THAT TREE SKIRT! Who could think of presents when there was crocheting that needed to be done? PUT DOWN THAT STOCKING, MONKEY! No unwrappy until I finish! HI-YA!

I had just over 4 rows to go and crocheted while we watched the online Christmas Eve service of our old church in VA and while Big Mister played with Little Mister and while I ate breakfast and after I fed Little Mister for the second time. Crochet, crochet, crochet!

And finally....I finished!

CHRISTMAS! And Santa! And CHRISTMAS!

So then we could put the presents under the tree.

My Gummy Bear!

Although Little Mister was ashamed that I had not weaved in the ends before putting it in use.

Ughhhhh. What am I going to do with her?

But Santa Koala approved.

I'm a koala and I approve of this skirt.

Merry Christmas, y'all!

Christmas Memories from The Grinch

I finally did it. It was under threat of family abandonment and after a flurry of increasingly urgent emails, but I finally did it. Last night, I made up my Christmas wish list. Whew!

At risk of sounding Grinchy, I have not thought a whit about Christmas and to say I do not have the Christmas Spirit this year is like saying Santa has Type II Diabetes due to eons of gorging on cookies and milk set out by greedy boys and girls around the world. Yeah- that's right. Go ahead and continue stuffing him full of cookies- what's it to me if he goes into a diabetic coma while flying over Sacramento? I'm the Grinch! And I like my itty bitty teeny tiny heart! BAH HUMBUG!

Ah dang- getting my Christmas villains mixed up. MUST.SLEEP.MORE.

This holiday season has been the farthest thing from my mind, especially since I know that Santa doesn't deliver sleep on Christmas morning. I spent way too many years as a kid forcing my parents' eyelids open so we could unwrap our loot to ever think I'd be able to sleep in on Christmas morning. One year for my birthday I received an AM/FM microphone where, with the correct frequency, you could turn your radio into your own personal record studio. I'm pretty sure my parents really regretted that present on Christmas morning when their bedroom radios were playing non-stop, "IT'S CHRISTMAS!! IS IT TIME TO WAKE UP YET?? IT'S 4:30!!!!" and then, "HOW ABOUT NOW? IT'S 4:35!!!!!"

Of the three of us siblings, being the oldest, it was my duty to get the ball rolling whenever questions needed to be asked, boundaries needed to be pushed, and presents to be discovered and covertly unwrapped/wrapped back up prior to Christmas morning.  I think the only year I was unable to locate our presents was the year our mom hid them in the barn. I always wondered why our gifts smelled slightly of animal poop. Dang- she was a genius.

I was a pro at sllllooooooowly pulling the tape off of the wrapping as to not tear it and then rewrapping it once we found out what it was. My sister, unfortunately, could not keep her 4-year-old trap shut and would rat me out if my mom asked her point blank if we found them. I remember being so mad at her and saying, "I told you you got Bianca the Mouse and you still told on me?? I will remember this and blog about it someday so that everyone in the world will know what a Christmas ruiner you are!" 

Ok, maybe I didn't say the last part, but it really was Bianca the Mouse- a detail like that is seared in my mind after such a heinous sisterly betrayal. And then my brother and I would shun her and she would cry and then my mom would get mad at us and take away our presents so that she was the only one who would have any since she was such a reliable rat so honest and pure.

As we got older, our love and impatience for Christmas morning never waned and we all would try to catch our mom filling our stockings in the wee hours of the morning and always just miss her. Each year promising that we would not attempt to wake them up before 6am and each year say, "Well, 5:45 is almost 6!" Each year dumping out our stockings so we could chew a piece of Double Bubble while sorting out our gifts into piles so we could count who had the most gifts and each year my bro and I would gripe that our sister once again had the most.

Those Christmas memories are some of my favorite memories and I must admit to being transported back to our childhood where we three were always cooking up something mischevious and fun. Ahh- to have the childlike love and purity during this season. That's what's been missing. I thought it was the weather that was missing- how can it be Christmas when it's 100 degrees outside? I thought it was the lack of Christmas music blaring in all the stores since October. I thought it was the lack of Christmas decorations since My Mister decided at the last minute to put all of our decorations into storage* which means we have no evidence of Christmas AT ALL in our house as of yet.

Yes, it is a little of all of those things, but it's mostly that I've grown up and have grown up worries and stressors and have lost my focus as I wearily stumble through my day. I just need a change of focus right now. Instead of being the little girl who tried catching her mommy fill the stockings, I'm now the mommy and will one day have stockings to fill for my Little Mister. So, even though I'm not currently bursting at the seams with Christmas joy at this moment, I do now have a little child in my life who will one day try waking me up at 4am to open up his gifts and who CANNOT.WAIT. for Christmas to get here. I'll get to relive some of my memories as he's making his and I must admit, that does fill me with joy.

So, for that chubby-cheeked, almond-eyed little boy, I'm not letting this Christmas sneak past me, no matter how warm the weather or decoration-less we may be. My wish list was filled with things for him (and a little for me- that greedy little girl hasn't completely disappeared) and it'll be fun to see him playing with the wrapping paper and taking pictures of him with bows on his head (no matter how much his dad may complain). We ordered a tree online and will hopefully get it this week. I've scored some decorations that were on sale while grocery shopping the other day, so we'll at least have a little evidence of Christmas fairly soon. And I've got the best husband in the whole world who has been mischievously giggling as boxes come in the mail since he hasn't forgotten about Christmas this year and has been buying me gifts for a while. (I know- how does a Grinch like me deserve a Who like him?)

So, with only 12 days left til Christmas, I'm going to try to bring back those childhood memories, starting with all of our favorite Christmas cartoons. Bring on Rudolph, Charlie Brown, Garfield, Frosty, and even The Grinch! I'll leave you with one of my favorite scenes from A Claymation Christmas- makes me laugh each time. :)



* Even though I griped at him when our stuff got here and I realized that we didn't have our Christmas decorations, I really can't blame him for this decision- Australia has some of the strictest import and quarantine guidelines in the world. We didn't have time to go through our decorations to ensure our stuff wouldn't be delayed because we didn't take out the wreath that had a pinecone in it. Also, our lights wouldn't have run without using a transformer, anyway, so we would have to buy new lights regardless. All this to say, we'll begin making new Christmas memories this year, which is a good thing.