Friday Five – Childhood Christmas Joys

2 Dec

photo via Pinterest posted by Nicole Kraus

This week I’ve been working on being intentional; in my marriage, in my appreciation of the season, and in preparing my heart and spirit for Christmas. In the spirit of preparing for the Christmas Season, this Friday I wanted to share five things I remember fondly from times of preparation for Christmases past. And fair’s fair…if I tell you mine, I want to know yours!

  1. Advent Calendars
    We had two that I remember. One was two layers of cardboard with cut out doors. Each door had a number on it, and when you opened it a part of the nativity scene was revealed. The other was a tower of tiny drawers. Each one had a number, and each held a tiny prize. A chocolate, a pair of stick-on earrings (remember those ladies? Childhood gold.) I think I knew even then that those surprises weren’t there accidentally or magically – that my mom had taken the time to select each one to delight her girls. The one with the drawers caused a bit of anti-Christmas -spirit contention in our house, as we didn’t have much so had to share the prize calendar, taking turns on who got the gift each day and who opened the door on the Christmas scene. Torture to a six-year old, but it taught me patience, tolerance, and the value of waiting.
  2. Driving Around to Look at Christmas Lights
    We didn’t have many Christmas traditions – especially as the years passed and the family ties started to fray – but driving around to look at Christmas lights happened for enough years in a row to make a deep impression on my childhood Christmas memories. My dad would pile us into the car, bundled up in puffy jackets and hats, and we’d drive to the more upscale neighborhoods that boardered San Bernardino, the car heater intermittently sputtering or blasting, depending on what we were driving that year. When we spotted a likely looking street (meaning you could see the glow from down the block) dad would pull in and sloooowly drive down the row so my sisters and I could press our noses against the glass and ooh and ahh. If we were lucky the street turned out to be a cul-de-sac and we could enjoy the lights each way, without switching from window to window in effort to not miss anything.
  3. An Eclectic Christmas Tree
    None of our ornaments matched. Each year mom would get out the cardboard boxes containing our ornaments and we’d pull apart balls of tissue paper looking for the unique bauble inside. As we unwrapped each one, either mom or dad would tell us the story of how they got it. As soon as I was old enough to have memories from previous years, I remember exclaiming over each one as it was revealed “oh, I remember that one! That’s my favorite one. I want to hang it!” I’m sure my parents loved that, especially since we must have had at least sixty ornaments, all of which were ‘my favorite’.
  4. Palm Trees Decorated with Ornaments
    I grew up in SoCal. ‘Nuff said.
  5. Putting Out Cookies for Santa
    My mom always listened to my opinion on what type of cookies Santa would like best. Some years I thought homemade was best (oatmeal chocolate chip was a personal favorite), other years Oreos were the haute cuisine of cookies. I obsessed over the note I wrote to santa and carefully placed the cookies, milk, and carrots on a plate. (Unpeeled, unwashed. Hey, they were reindeer.) I counted how many he ate the next day, analyzed the nibbles on the carrot (apparently reindeer aren’t very hungry creatures) and poured over the note Santa always wrote back on the note I left for him like it held the secrets to the universe. I never noticed that Santa’s handwriting – on the note, on the present tags – looked a lot like the writing on the tags on gifts marked ‘from mom and dad.’

What are your favorite memories from Christmas past? Post them in the comments or on your blog (and drop me a line so I can visit) and share your memories!

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Cozy Autumn Night

1 Dec

Making Peace with the Season

30 Nov

photo from pinterest via Karen Kay, from homefurnituremag.com

I recently rediscovered my love of candles. I used to burn them all the time – in high school, when I fancied myself to be quite the hippie child. It feels right, this time of year, to bring little flames of light into the home. It’s cozy, comforting, and something I’m finding I really missed.

I don’t do well this time of year. The Autumn time change brings nightfall as soon as I get off work, and for sun-loving me, it also brings a nice case of the blues. I get very down after the time change – at loose ends, one might say – and it lasts anywhere from a week to a month. Right now I’m on week two of downsville, so I thought it might help to make a list of five things that I appreciate about this time of year to get me into a more grateful mood. So in no particular order, here are the things I’m thankful for that only come around this time of year.

Chai to Remember Sweater via ModCloth

Cozy Sweaters
I’d rather be in a tank top, for sure, but there’s something incredibly comforting about coming home, turning on lights, wrapping myself in a cozy sweater and comfy pants, and walking around my house lighting candles and a fire before starting dinner.

Winter Squash soup via smittenkitchen.com

Everyday Soup
During Spring and Summer our table is loaded with the fresh farmer’s market bounty of California.Soup is for sick days, and even then only if it’s under 80 degrees. When the weather turns nippy, however, my love of good, homemade soups can run wild. Is there anything better than hot soup with fresh bread and butter? Soup is simple, inexpensive to make in large batches and freeze, one-pot wonders, there really is no downside. Chestnut and celery root soup, potato leek, think stew, apricot turkey, lentils corriander, mmmmmmm……My friend Katie over at Cakes, Tea and Dreams knows what I’m talking about.

Holiday Celebrations I’m not much for the awkward workplace variety, but get-togethers with friends and loved ones are the best. They happen so much more frequently around the holidays, and are a great reminder of how very, very lucky we are to have so many great people in our lives.

photo from Pinterest via Chloe Hu.

Starbucks Holiday Cups
Especially when they come filled with a creme bruleé latte, or an eggnog lattee cut with regular milk.

Cuddly Husband
I don’t have a photo for this one, but it’s definately one of my favorite things. A. gets very cozy and cuddly when the temperature drops. Evenings are spent holding each other on the couch, watching a movie, maybe with popcorn and champagne if I’m lucky. 🙂

That’s my list, now I want to know what’s on yours! What makes you thankful for this time of year?

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Tick Tock Goes the Clock

29 Nov

image

My mantel clock is ticking, ten minutes too slow. 1:41 (1:51) AM. I can’t count how many times I’ve been late because of that clock. A simple fix: pop the back, take out battery, insert new AAA. Dang, no AAA’s. Does anything else in our house run on AAA’s? Must run to Target. Never remember, even when am at Target. That’s why the clock is running ten minutes too slow, five months later.

It’s a gift from my mother. She bought it after a holiday décor-seeking mother-daughter shopping trip to our local Pier1. I saw it and fell in love, because it matched the side table with the wrought iron birds in the base that I’d giddily bought months earlier to help me feel nested in our brand new (to us) townhome. The clock cost $15, and I couldn’t afford it. It was a want, not a need, and I was being good. That Christmas season – one in which we’d promised to exchange no gifts and donate to charity instead – my mother presented me with the clock she’d seen me sighing over months earlier. Not a Christmas gift, she insisted, an ‘I love you’ gift. It cost $15, but to me it may as well have been $10,000, because she’d remembered.

I grew up in a house that ran on ticking clocks. Clocks that would chime the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour. My grandma kept each one wound, and they kept the rhythm of the nights I couldn’t sleep. Nights where the shadows moved mysteriously across my bedroom (living room) wall. Nights I couldn’t figure out why I felt different than the other kids in my (borrowed) neighborhood. The nights my daddy wasn’t there, because we weren’t living with him just then. I timed my breathing carefully to match that clock’s tock-tick-tock, and Sleep – my constant, elusive playmate – would eventually find me. In the morning things were bright. The tick-tock-tick kept pace with my running feet and smiling breath. I was safe because I had my mom to hug me and tell me she loved me, my grandma to give me ‘Nilla wafers and milk and call me pumpkin, and my five aunts plus mom plus grandma to read me fairy tales, taking me to new places that I could visit in books and in dreams. In that house little girls were always special and someone was always there to listen to my thoughts and songs, and tell me I could be whatever I dreamed I could be.

The light on our computer/TV keeps a blinking time with the ten minutes too slow tick-tock clock. Odd what you notice at 1:57 (2:07) AM. When sleep is as elusive as it was when you were little and your grandmother’s cuckoo clock marked the hours of your life.

Working on #1 With Benefit

28 Nov

I’ve tried a few times to get on board with the daily sunscreen routine, to no avail. So I decided to pull out the big guns. I walked into Sephora with a specific mission: get a good-feeling daily moisturizer that didn’t make me feel greasy, had a decent spf, and was tipping towards this side of luxury so that I would feel excited to use it every day without breaking the bank. Enter Benefit.

I love Benefit, and have since high school. Since before I knew what good makeup was. I was assured by the uber-helpful sales girl that even though it was a new product for them at the time, it was already a huge hit with consumer reviews. A quick test at the counter left me with sweet-smelling, softly glowing cheeks with no greasy feeling. Quite the opposite, actually, my face felt moisturized and fresh. I took home a bottle with high hopes.

Benefit does not disappoint. I used it for two weeks straight and was complimented regularly on how healthy and ‘glowing’ I looked. My friend Lady Dianne insisted it was because of the new workout regimen we started – week two and I was glowing already! – but I knew it was due to the cream. It just made me feel better. The one downside to this cream is it is scented. I think it’s the scent that accounts for the funny taste…hold on, before you go thinking I lick my face cream, there are plenty of socially acceptable ways I can tell that it has an obtrusively bad taste.

  • Scenario one: I put it on in the morning, avoiding my immediate mouth area, and head to work. Between campuses I grab a cappuccino, and since I have a rare ten minutes to enjoy my frothy treat I pop the top and sit down to sip while perusing my favorite blogs. While sipping, some velvety foam gets on my lip, so I stick out my tongue to lick it off. Instead of creamy, espresso-ey goodness, I get a bitter, astringent flavor that totally puts me off my cuppa.
  • Scenario two: A comes home from work, and is understandably thrilled to see me. A loves to kiss my cheeks. I don’t know why, maybe I have cute cheeks. So after a big A-Bear hug, he plants one on my smooch-puff. He then gives me a big, sweet, butterfly-inducing smooch on the lips…only it would have been that kind of kiss, if it weren’t for that bitter, astringent taste. Totally ruins the moment.
So, yes, I know my face cream tastes bad. Which wouldn’t be a big deal, except that it doesn’t stop tasting bad, even hours after I apply it. In my book, it makes my skin look and feel so kissably-good that I can forgive it a little bitterness during otherwise sweet moments. I just know that I have to proceed with caution and encourage A to kiss the non-moisturized areas on my face when I apply it. So definitely worth the buy, but next time I may walk in to Sephora and specifically request a face cream that doesn’t taste bad.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Hold on, Christy, if you’ve already found a product you love, wouldn’t that mean you’ve accomplished #1 on The List to wear sunscreen? Not so in my book, my friends, not so. You see, it takes roughly 21 days to make or break a habit, longer if the habit is addictive. The longest streak I’ve ever had putting cream on every day is 16 days. I’ll go in fits and spurts, then take a few weeks off. I’m really bad about it, actually, which is why it’s on my list. So I’ll cross this baby off when I’ve got a solid three months under my belt – I figure by then that habit will be pretty ingrained. Will Benefit take me all the way? Only time will tell…

Do you use a daily moisturizer with spf? Let me know what you like, and I’ll know what to try next!

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