O, Christmas Tree.

This year we got our Christmas tree relatively early (if I'm remembering correctly we got our tree only a few days before Christmas last year...), but I'm so happy that we did!  Each year my excitement and anticipation for Christmas grows exponentially, and this year I really had to steel myself to wait to completely immerse myself in everything Christmas until after Thanksgiving.  I made it.  Barely.  

Picking out a tree from a city parking lot sure is different than what I grew up doing.  I remember my Dad would take us out to the woods every year, and we'd walk and walk and walk until we found a tree we all liked (usually a 30 footer...no point in cutting down all the little trees!).  Then he'd climb to the tippy tippy top and lop off the top, and that would be our Christmas tree.  It was also so dreamy to walk through the glittery snow on those freezing cold days...

I love our mini tree.  So perfect and charming.  And, obviously, Evangeline's a big fan.  

Advent Calendar.

I just love preparing for Christmas.  There is really nothing I love more than cozying up in our apartment, turning on Christmas music, and wrapping pretty packages, making wreaths, or doing some holiday baking.  One of the things I especially wanted to make this year was an Advent Calendar.  My family had always had one when I was young and I remember the excitement it afforded me as a child--there's nothing like a countdown to build anticipation.  I deliberated a lot over what kind of calendar I wanted to make--many of the ideas that I stumbled across were just far too complicated and elaborate for me this year (I'm just not organized enough to buy and wrap 25 different mini presents...!).  Ultimately I ended up inventing my own out of some beautiful birch bark coasters my brothers had made for me last time we were in Maine.  

This calendar was really so easy to make.  Since they were already cut, I just sanded them a little and then used a simple ink pen (I'm sure there's a better way to do that) to write the date and the corresponding Bible verse.  (Alex helped me paint the boughs, and drilled the holes for the string...thanks Al!).  I hung each day from string on a branch I found outside, and then wrapped some eucalyptus to make the whole calendar a little more festive.  Every night during the lighting of the Advent wreath we read the verse for that particular day!  The best thing about this?  We can reuse it next year! 

Happy Christmas Preparations! 

Weekend Snapshots.

1.  Our first Christmas Tree!  (Alex looks so handsome, even with glowing eyes...I am so blessed to be able to spend this Christmas with this wonderful man!)

2.  I wasn't feeling the best on Saturday, so after a long skype session with my family, we ordered in pizza and watched The Charlie Brown Christmas, which never fails to disappoint.  Alex had never seen it, but loved it.  That film will definitely be part of our Christmas line-up.  

 3.  We spent Sunday listening to Handel's Messiah and making this awesome, Pinterest-inspired, au naturale chandelier.  This is the website I found the image on, but there were no instructions, so we sort of faked it with wire and string. 

I think it turned out pretty okay! 

4.  I made one of my favourite (possibly the most favourite) soups for Sunday dinner.  Here is the recipe, because it is the easiest to make and the most delicious thing you'll taste: 

Butternut Squash and White Bean Soup

1 tbs. olive oil

2 c. chopped onion

6 cloves garlic

1 tbs. paprika

28 oz. chicken broth

3 c. cubed, peeled butternut squash

1 14.5 oz. can diced tomatoes, undrained

1 tsp. rosemary

1 19 oz. can canellini beans, drained and rinsed

1 tbs. parsley

1 tsp. thyme

kosher salt

pepper

Cook the onion, garlic, and paprika in the oil until the onions are softened.  Add the squash, broth, tomatoes, and rosemary.  Bring to boiling; reduce heat and simmer until the squash is tender.  Add beans, parsley, thyme, salt and pepper.  Enjoy! 

5.  We also made our first batch of Christmas cookies (sugar cookies) Sunday evening with our Star Wars Cookie Cutters.  Alex was very enthusiastic about making Star Wars Christmas Cookies one of our Christmas traditions.  The dough was a little too buttery though, and the cookies stretched out a bit; though you can still see Darth's face, it's a little fatter than usual.  

6.  All day Friday, the refrigerator had been making the most awful noise--this loud, rackety banging and buzzing.  When Al got home that night, I brought it up because it had been so awfully annoying all day long and I wanted it fixed.  He said that he was pretty sure he knew what the problem was. 

Turns out, he had hidden a present for me under the fridge and it was that that was making all the noise.  (Best Husband Ever.) 

But now I'm just desperate to know what is small enough to have hidden under the fridge but big enough to make the entire thing tremble and shake and emit such awful noises.  I guess I'll have to wait and see.  

Advent Putterings.

Crafting, baking, crafting, baking, crafting.  That's how I spend my time these days.  That being said, let me also say that there have been many successes...as well as many failures.  My two most recent projects were: 

1. Making Peppermint Bark

2. Re-upholstering two chairs I found at Salvation Army

Can you guess which one of these was a failure?  

WRONG. 

It was the Peppermint Bark.  

(beautiful beginnings...) 

 I've made Peppermint Bark thousands of times.  It's easy.  All it is is melting chocolate and then putting it on wax paper with crushed candy canes.  How can you mess that up?  That's what I thought.  I mean, I'd just re-upholstered a chair.  Forgive me if I thought I was invincible.  Turns out, it's very difficult to make Peppermint Bark without a double-boiler.  Steeped in hubris, I thought "I'll just pull the old melt-the-chocolate-in-a-bowl-in-a-pot-of-water trick!"  Easy.  Two hardened pounds of chocolate and six burned fingers later, I was mad Googling how to fix my mess-up.  (Apparently adding 1tsp. of warm water and then mixing ferociously softens the chocolate.  It worked...somewhat.  I think my right bicep has grown in size after all the mixing.)   The chocolate was still too thick after about thirty minutes of stirring, but I slopped it on the baking sheets (Some jerk posted online also that if you don't have wax paper that non-stick baking pans will work fine.  This is a lie.) and covered the mess with the damn candy canes.  

Granted, it doesn't taste awful even if it looks like a car crash.  It's just too thick and an all around disappointing experience.  (Luckily, Alex loves it, and because it's now useless as Christmas presents, I'm just letting him eat it all.  Thanks, best husband ever.)  

But as for my re-upholstering, I am very pleased with how it is turning out for my very first effort!  (Thanks, Mom Burch, for the coolest new fabric!)  Here's a sneak peek: 

B.C. 

A.D. 

Advent Mutterings

As Christmas swiftly approaches (more quickly this year than the last...) it is difficult to pause and relish the wonder of the Advent season before the Christmas season arrives.  I find myself so wrapped up in Christmas shopping, craft making, and decorating that I rarely allow myself to have a truly fruitful Advent.  (Not that all this preparation is bad; not at all.  It is a good thing, and necessary!)  But I must continually remind myself in the midst of the sparkling material preparation that spiritual preparation takes precedent.  

  Advent is a time for meditating upon the beautiful mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery of God becoming man to save us:  

"Therefore because the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself in like manner hath been partaker of the same: that, through death, He might destroy him who had the empire of death, that is to say, the devil: And might deliver them, who through the fear of death were all their lifetime subject to servitude." (Hebrews 2:14-15) 

In Pope John Paul II's first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, the pope writes on Christ's role as our Redeemer and the importance of the human person in the world.  I find this paragraph to be particularly wonderful food for thought in preparation for the Christmas Season: 

"Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This, as has already been said, is why Christ the Redeemer "fully reveals man to himself". If we may use the expression, this is the human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption. In this dimension man finds again the greatness, dignity and value that belong to his humanity. In the mystery of the Redemption man becomes newly "expressed" and, in a way, is newly created. He is newly created! "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus". The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly-and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being-he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must "appropriate" and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process takes place within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself. How precious must man be in the eyes of the Creator, if he "gained so great a Redeemer", and if God "gave his only Son "in order that man "should not perish but have eternal life"."

Another reason to make the most of Advent: beautiful, glorious Advent carols!  Below is one of my favourites. 

O Come, O Come...

Advent is finally (or should I say suddenly?) here!  It kind of snuck up on me as I have spent the last few weeks making Christmas crafts and counting down the days to the most wonderful holiday of the year.   But here it is, and I cannot be happier.  It really is such a blissful time, chock full of Saint's feast days, Christmas baking and crafting, decorating, and prayer. 

In Phoenix, Al's Mom had bought a bunch of fresh greens for wreath making, and I brought my wreath back to Chicago so that it could serve as our Advent wreath.  I've never really liked the purple and pink tapers.  I really wanted just to have white tapers with pink and purple ribbons, but I saw that Al's Mom had put up white pillar candles with ribbons and I just about died at how beautiful it was, so I dashed to the store the day after we returned home and grabbed some ribbons and candles.  I am so happy with how my first wreath turned out.  (The photographs make the purple ribbon look burgundy...It's more of an aubergine, and so beautiful...)  

O Lord, stir up Thy might, we beg Thee, and come that by Thy protection we may deserve to be rescued from the threatening dangers of our sins and saved by Thy deliverance. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.