O, Christmas Tree

There has been some discussion of tinsel recently (from Carole and Vicki) and they've gotten me thinking about tinsel throughout my childhood. I was born in 1957, so we used real tinsel on our trees, the kind with lead in it. 

My father was almost a tinsel tyrant. After we decorated the tree with ornaments, he got out the tinsel and we all started carefully placing it on the branches, one strand at a time. That was fine for the first five minutes, but my sister and I quickly tired of one strand at a time and moved to the back of the tree where we could put on clumps of tinsel. After a few minutes, we were even more impatient and tried to get away with the Cardinal Christmas Sin of throwing tinsel at the tree. My father always noticed, reprimanded us, and gave us the annual lecture about how one strand at a time placed carefully and thoughtfully on each branch was the proper was to decorate. By this time my sister and I had often started crumpling the lead-based tinsel into balls to throw at each other.

But tinsel (properly placed!) did make our trees look like this:

"Real" tinsel was discontinued in 1972. I think my father stockpiled several boxes and we actually took it off the tree and tried to save it for a few years, but the strands broke and looked quite bedraggled. I wonder if I might have ended up a bit smarter if I hadn't been exposed to so much lead while decorating one strand at a time throughout my childhood and my sister throwing lead tinsel balls at me? I do kind of miss our tinsel-draped trees but this is my second year of not putting up a tree so there's nothing to put tinsel on. 

How about your trees - tinsel or not?
 

Dangerous Content Ahead!

Never fear, there isn't anything really dangerous in this post. It could be dangerous if you're concerned about healthy eating, your consumption of cake, or maybe your cholesterol level. But if you've got a bag of cranberries in your refrigerator or freezer, I have a delicious way for you to use them. 

I have a couple of recipes for Cranberry Cake/Pie in my recipe box. I've made them a couple of times, but I seemed to be the only one who ate it, and eating a whole cake (even if it is in a pie pan) by yourself is dangerous. So I haven't made either one for probably five years or more. But the other day I was perusing the King Arthur baking website and came across their recipe for Nantucket Cranberry Cake. Dinner was already in the crockpot (Venison Taco Soup if you want to make some good soup), but I was feeling the need for some type of slightly sweet dessert. So once I dug the bag of cranberries out of my freezer, I made this cake to satisfy my craving. 

 

And it's seriously good. I limited myself to one piece after dinner, but since I was writing this post, it seemed necessary for me to put a piece on a plate so I could take a photo. And once I had a piece of cake on a plate, I was pretty much committed to eating it. See how much I care about you guys and putting together posts with photos? I'm willing to eat a piece of cake for breakfast just so I can provide you with a better blog post. :-)

There is just something about the tart cranberries, buttery moist cake, and sugary topping that I find hard to resist. I might need to buy some coarse sugar and I'm wondering if the addition of orange zest or orange oil might be good. I didn't use walnuts because I'm not a big fan plus the fact that I didn't have any. I do like pecans so I might try them in place of the walnuts. So I've pretty much talked myself into making this cake again, maybe with some modifications. If you want to try an easy, delicious cake, maybe you want to try it, too!

Unraveled Wednesday: 12/11/24

I'm joining Kat and the Unravelers today with some slightly different making than my usual. After looking at my pile o' presents, I realized that I didn't have anything for Nugget. I spent some time on YouTube (okay, quite a bit of time after I started watching cats riding Roombas) and found some ideas. So I'm sparing you another week with the Sparkly Hitchhiker and you get to see some sewing for a cat instead.

These are "kitty kickers", basically little pillows sewn and stuffed with polyester fiberfill and catnip. Nugget has one that she uses by flopping on her side, grabbing the toy and doing a cute little bunny kick with her back feet. I'm not sure how she feels about ribbons, so I made two with ribbons, and one without. John thought I was sewing pillows for Nugget to lay her head on, which I guess she could do if she wanted to. The plaid one is even nice and fuzzy.

Reading this week consisted of an average short story and an exceptional memoir. My Last Name was a pleasant short story that I won from goodreads. The author tells the story of Lottie, 95 years old, infirm, and living in a care facility. She struggles with her memory, understanding exactly where she is, and who is with her, but she still clearly recalls important moments in her life. A longer book would have enabled me to better understand Lottie and her life, and it was a bit too religious for my personal taste, but it was still a sweet end-of-life story.I gave it three stars.

It feels quite wrong to review the memoir of someone else's grief at the death of a spouse, but that is my task here. I read several reviews of Memorial Days and wanted to see if I would appreciate Geraldine Brooks' nonfiction writing as much as her fiction. I also knew that I didn't want to wait until the book was published in February, and I'm happy that I didn't have to. I found this to be every bit as good as her fiction writing.

Memorial Days recounts the time after Brooks' husband Tony Horwitz literally dropped dead on a Washington, D.C. sidewalk in May of 2019. The author tells the more immediate story of frantically trying to travel from their home on Martha's Vineyard to Washington and all the bits and pieces of what happened next. These chapters alternate with her thoughts and feelings after she has flown to Flinders Island off the coast of Australia to truly grieve three years later. Brooks and Horwitz met in journalism school and they lived and reported from many locations around the world before settling in Martha's Vineyard to raise their two sons. On Flinders Island she she writes about the varied ways other cultures grieve, such as Australia's Indigenous People, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites, and how she might move through similar practices herself.

The author enjoys some amount of privilege, like having the resources to fly to a sparsely populated island to process her grief, and having her cancelled health insurance reinstated because she had some connections and the right people were on her side. She writes about the consolation she and her son felt reading Tony's obituaries in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. But she also recognizes this and writes about it, noting that these are not things the average person is likely to benefit from. Brooks is honest about dying in the Unites States, from receiving the news from an exhausted and overworked resident, to the red tape involved in getting Tony's body released to a funeral home, to having her credit cards and health insurance cancelled because they were in her husband's name. Geraldine Brooks' memoir is every bit as good as her fiction writing, and now I need to reread Horse. I didn't realize that she was only half done writing that book when her husband died, which makes Horse an even more remarkable novel.

Thank you Edelweiss and Viking for providing me with a copy of this book. It will be published on February 4, 2025.

What are you making and reading this week?

I've Got a Plan

Correction: I had a plan, but it seems to have fallen apart. Last Friday, Mary wrote that she had ordered some royal blue alpaca/merino yarn to knit the Wavelength Wrap. She wrote, "1,200 yards of worsted weight yarn can weather a crisis. (right?!)" This got me thinking that maybe some new yarn could help me get through the cold winter months and any unfortunate events that might be happening on or around January 20th. 

 

I looked at lots of patterns and yarn, and finally decided that I needed to knit an afghan. I found a relatively easy pattern, appropriately called Look for Happiness (ravelry link). Designer Mary Lee from Fifty Four Ten Studio encourages knitters to "Look for happiness under your own roof,” to actively look for happy moments on ordinary days… within our own homes." That seemed like a great start to my plan, so next I looked for yarn. 

I settled on Berroco Vintage in a lovely dark green. It's machine washable,  contains wool, and Webs was having a 40% off Black Friday sale. I ordered enough to knit my chosen pattern and patted myself on the back for finding a yarn I liked so I could knit an afghan for a reasonable price. I ordered a 60" size 8 circular needle from Amazon and was pleased that my plan had come together so nicely.

Until Monday, when I got an email from Webs that my order had been cancelled. No explanation, no reason, just cancelled. They still had the yarn in stock so I was puzzled. I looked around for a different yarn, but many of them were prohibitively expensive. I decided to think about it for a while, and then Amazon delivered my circular needle. They had sent a size 4 instead of an 8, so my plan had been scuttled by two different sources. I know I could easily fix the plan, but paying quite a bit more for the yarn and reordering a needle made me seriously question whether I really wanted to knit an afghan. 

I got this lovely skein of 100% Tunis from Glenfiddich Farm the last time I visited my SiL. I intended to knit some warm fingerless mitts for myself with it, so now my plan has been modified. I'll wind this beautiful, squishy skein sometime before Jan. 20th, decide on a pattern, and be knitting by the 20th. This plan is completely doable, and mitts knit from wool from such adorable sheep (lambs are born with red fleece and their faces stay a reddish color) will surely help to make me happy.

Unraveled Wednesday: 12/4/24

I'm joining Kat and the Unravelers today, with the Sparkly Hitchhiker still in progress. You've seen it quite a few times before and it looks pretty much the same except for more rows of garter and yarnovers. 

Sorry for the poor photo, but I'm taking pictures on Tuesday night and this is the best i could do. Never fear, you will probably see this Hitchhiker another time (or two). 

I was also looking through my Christmas pile and decided that I felt like weaving another potholder for Ryan. He has told me numerous times and quite emphatically that he has enough knitted items (hats, fingerless gloves, and scarves) and doesn't need any more. So I have made him more potholders than he probably needs or wants, but he can always put the extras in a drawer. He likes turtles and I had this idea for a pattern that would produce rows of turtles. I spent several afternoons this week trying to draft the pattern on paper, but finally gave up and just started weaving. 

I wove about 10 rows starting from the bottom and was feeling frustrated that it wasn't looking like I had pictured it. Then I turned the loom over, and there they were!

 If you look at the green rows, you can (hopefully) see four turtles in a row. They're kind of stylized, with just one green square for the head, five for the front legs and body, three squares for the main part of the body, five squares again for the back legs and body, and one square for the tail. I'm letting it sit on the loom for a night and it will bind it off after a day or so. Maybe I'll circle a turtle in a photo next week after it's bound off. It's not really a spectacular design accomplishment, but I was glad that I could weave a piece that looked something like I had imagined. 

I read a couple of books last week, one that wasn't really my cup of tea and an ARC that I enjoyed. I don't usually mind unlikable characters in fiction, in fact, sometimes they can add interest and reality to a tale. But that was not the case for me with Jane Gibson, protagonist of Colored Television. Jane is a biracial untenured college professor, struggling to finish her second novel that she's been working on for a decade, that her husband Lenny calls a "mullato War and Peace". Early on in the book there is a flashback to a party Jane has attended after she has consulted an “intuitive psychodynamic counselor with a specialty in racial alchemy,” (a psychic). He told her that she’s about to meet her future husband, a funny, tall, handsome Black man who would be wearing “West Coast shoes.” This is Lenny, a painter and the moral compass in the relationship. Jane lies to the people around her and to herself in order to portray herself as a better person than she really is when she tries to break into television writing. Appearances are important to Jane; her life revolves around race, parenting, money, and art, with never enough money or responsibility on Jane's part for any of these things. Her husband asks, "Ever think that instead of trying to be rich you should try not to be homeless?," when they need to leave their fancy house-sitting gig. Maybe it's because I'm not a big television watcher, but many of Jane's ideas for tv just sounded inane to me. Maybe that's just TV? Jane seemed far too malleable, taking on the personality and ideas of those around her and saying what she thought they wanted to hear. I wish that Lenny and their children had been developed more because they were far more interesting characters to me. I gave this one three stars.

I've enjoyed the four books by Curtis Sittenfeld that I've read, so I looked forward to reading this collection of short stories when it was offered to me. Show Don't Tell is a witty and insightful collection of short stories that delve into the intricacies of human relationships, self-perception, and the complexities of everyday life. Known for her sharp observations and emotionally resonant writing, Sittenfeld brings her signature style to this collection, exploring themes of love, loss, identity, and the human condition.

The title itself is a nod to one of the key principles of writing, and throughout these stories, the author masterfully shows rather than tells, allowing readers to experience the characters' emotions and struggles in a deeply visceral way. Her prose is clear yet nuanced, often leaving room for interpretation and reflection long after the stories have ended.

One of the collection's strengths is its diversity in both character and setting. From the perspective of a teacher navigating a complicated relationship with a student to a woman reckoning with her past during a reunion, Sittenfeld explores the complexities of individual experiences with remarkable empathy. Each story feels like a small window into a larger world, showing the quiet moments that shape people’s lives in subtle but profound ways.

While some stories are more reflective and contemplative, others are charged with a certain tension or urgency that keeps the reader engaged. The characters are flawed and relatable, and their journeys feel honest, poignant, and relatable.

Like most short story collections, several of these stories left me wanting more depth or a clearer resolution. There were one or two stories that ended so abruptly I wondered if I had missed the last page. But the last story, "Lost But Not Forgotten" was so good that I could overlook the few with sudden endings. In this story, we get to revisit Lee Fiora when she attends a reunion decades later at the boarding school Sittenfeld wrote about in Prep. I remembered that I liked Prep but didn't recall any details about why so I'm re-reading it now, decades later.

Overall, Show Don’t Tell is a four-star, beautifully crafted collection that will resonate with fans of literary fiction. The author's sharp eye for detail and her ability to weave complex emotional truths into every story makes this a highly recommended read for those who appreciate thoughtful, character-driven narratives.

Thank you to Random House publishing Group and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book. It will be published on February 25, 2025.

What are you making and reading this week?