Seasonal Notes

Sunday night December 17th: not a good night to start idly paging through your Martha Stewart books. Why, why didn't I make gallons of preserves in July, hundreds of fruitcakes in October, and comb the antique stores for the perfect baskets and bowls in which to present my gifts. (Okay, I know in the case of the fruitcakes it's because I'm well aware that everyone hates fruitcake).

But I did get all Martha Stewart-y on a small scale. The girls helped me strip the leaves off of a lot of lemon verbena I had drying in the attic. We cut circles from some plaid fabric I had hanging around and made little sachet bundles. We wove Danish heart baskets. Today I made stuffed dates (I roll them in sugar), for which I usually enlist S.'s help but she has strep throat again and that's not a gift I want to give.


And then we packed all those things, plus the odd ornament or two, in with the Starbucks cards and voila! Teacher presents. Safe for another year. And without all that pesky canning.

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There's a song I am currently loving, and apparently the DJ at Lite FM is too. It has to be hard to listen to Andy Williams exhorting you to hang up your sock several times a day, so thank goodness there's Dan Fogelberg and his excellent Same Old Lang Syne.