My daughter, C. brought these beautiful paper placemats of cardinals decked out in Renaissance-like headgear. Just LOVED their whimsical touch to our Christmas table this year. The truffle salt that we used on the roast filet of beef wasn’t too bad either! Lots of good cheer and thoughtful gifts, all around. We are thankful for such sweet family gatherings.
We usually think of sangria as a fruit wine punch that you drink in the sun and warmth of summer parties. We’re having a light lunch on Christmas Eve day – and I was reflecting on what would be good to drink with a meal of proscuitto with honeydew melon, duck rillettes that I’ve been saving since Thanksgiving and French onion soup.
So I searched online for “Christmas Sangria” not knowing what might turn up and this lovely recipe surfaced. It’s made with green Granny Smith and Honeycrisp apples, fresh cranberries (green and red fresh fruit, right?); white wine, white grape juice, club soda and sugar. The recipe recommended a Pinot Grigio for the wine. A comment below it suggested a drier wine like a Sauvignon Blanc coupled with a little Grand Marnier. That sounded interesting to me – more complex in the layers of flavor.
I rummaged around and found a beautiful antique glass pitcher in the cupboard and will fill it with this Christmas Sangria for our lunch on Thursday. Since we don’t want to nod off and nap all afternoon after lunch, I’ll make just a pitcher full and see where that takes us. The recipe calls for letting the fresh fruit and liquids sit in the fridge with a large sprig of fresh rosemary for at least an hour. It also suggests dipping moistened rosemary sprigs with granulated sugar to look like pine boughs covered with snow as garnish for each tumbler full of sangria.
Truly charming, don’t you think? Maybe you’d like to try it too?
our IKEA wall hanging Christmas Tree this year!
Christmas is very special for us every year and the tree has been the centerpiece of our family’s celebrations for decades. We have had a fresh Christmas tree, bought for so many years at the Follen Church tree sale in Lexington while the girls were growing up. One year, we woke up to find that M. (when she was a teenager) had strung some string around it and tied the end to a doorknob to hold the tilting tree up after she got home late from babysitting one year.
It was fun over the years to add new assortments of hand-crafted or antique mercury ornaments. The whole enterprise of the Christmas tree grew like topsy so that incrementally, it became a big deal, year after year. Our second floor hall closet is dedicated primarily to Christmas tree associated things: decorations, lights and all the extras all carefully sorted and labeled every year after the holidays.
The tree was decorated in a process that included layering a series of decorations after the strings of small white lights were set in place on the tree. Then:
These Christmas trees over the years were indeed something to behold! And it required a lot of effort and time to put them up and then to take them down after the holidays. (The worst was always looking for the Christmas tree stand before the tree could be brought in the house!) You could imagine how many different boxes things had to go in; the lights wound together in one, the tiniest “best” ornaments in another. And so on and so on. . . One year, we even brought all the decorations up to the cottage on the Atlantic that we rented for the winter. That year, I found a $12 dollar tree at the lumber yard in Gloucester that was perky and sweet, the shape of which reminds me uncannily of the one in the header photo above.
I love Christmas because the season is full of ideas, surprises and humorous presents that we hope will get a big laugh or exclamation of joy when they are opened on the 25th every year. For awhile now, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to simplify this Christmas tree tradition so that more time could be spent on having fun and less on sorting, unpacking and then repacking what was beginning to feel like a ritual obligation rather than a loving tradition.
So, this year, we did something completely different. After the holidays last year while browsing through “Elle Decoration” a UK magazine that I enjoy, I came upon a photograph of a Swedish home with a huge wall hanging of a natural Christmas tree. It was printed by IKEA and was six feet long and five feet wide. I couldn’t believe my eyes! For one thing, the tree was the exact kind of natural tree that it is futile to find anymore unless you go out and cut your own (which I would never do given the waste of all those trees already cut in Canada in early November that never make it to someone’s home.) It was beautifully, irregularly proportioned with a very tall spike of branch at the top and sides that hadn’t been trimmed with an electric saw to make it look completely symmetrical to please the buying public.
After Thanksgiving this year, I somehow remembered that IKEA wall hanging and decided to transform our idea of a Christmas tree this year. When it arrived, I was impressed by the weight of the fabric and how finely it was woven. It was printed in Sweden with the maker’s name woven into the selvedge of the fabric. The fabric was cut very close to the tree design on the top and the bottom so instead of folding it over to hem for a hanging sleeve, I sewed on wide facing that I stitched by hand on the underside on both ends to preserve as much white border visually as possible.
Then came the mechanical engineering part of hanging it over the large mirror opposite the piano in the alcove where we usually put the tree. G. constructed a piece of corner shaped molding to attach it to and then hang it from the wall on the left side. On the other end which extended beyond the wall, he rigged up a holder to slip the rod through where it could rest securely.
We hung it up and both of us loved how it looked!
There was a slight twinge of regret that there wouldn’t be a live tree this year. I found some boughs of pine at the farmers market and set it in a white enamel bucket nearby to give off some fragrance. And although I loved smelling the trees for sale there, the thought of putting it up and what that effort would have entailed reinforced my desire to do something new that would still be wonderful this year – and that we could enjoy for years to come.
We left the hanging alone for about a week and moved a rosewood coffee table underneath it to give the appearance that the tree was set on top of the table. I experimented with some spot lighting but while it lit the front of the tree, it appeared rather flat. For a couple of days, we played around with setting up a string of lights in front of it but it looked awkward rather than enhancing the effect.
Then yesterday, G. came upstairs with a couple of graduated size thin strips of wood that he had cut notches into the ends. He set the double string of lights on a top ring hook and then we taped each strand of lights on the notches in descending widths the same shape as the tree branches on the wall hanging. He then moved the whole contraption behind the hanging and hung it from the center of the rod. As we turned the lights on for the first time and the lights twinkled as though they were on the tree and rather than lit from behind, a magic wand from the Universe waved and our modern Christmas tree sparkled.
Oh Christmas tree! Oh Christmas tree! – a transformation that will make our life easier from now on, free to making the holidays more meaningful with projects that we have shared in creating together.
It’s gratifying to feel that we don’t have to “give things up” as time goes on . . . and that we can enhance our lives in ways we hadn’t thought of before! And this year, the “Merry Christmas” ornament is nestled with other ornaments in a cherry burl bowl on our kitchen table.
Merry Christmas everybody!
On Tuesday, I had a chance to have lunch with a friend whom I’ve known since junior high school back in Virginia. It was the first time I’d seen him in a few months, the last time when I brought him sushi to his house while he was recovering from radiation and immunotherapy treatments for Stage IV melanoma that had metastisized to tumors in his brain.
Now, just a few months later, he looked light and uplifted with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye that I had not seen for years, even before he became so terminally ill, it seemed. We had a relaxing lunch at my favorite Japanese restaurant in Northampton, MA. where the manager of the restaurant offered us desserts, compliments of the house! We had each feared that he might not make it to Christmas this year – but instead, he seems so stabilized and recovered that he drove himself to Virginia for a Thanksgiving visit with his family just a couple of weeks ago.
Former President Jimmy Carter has made a similarly remarkable recovery from melanoma and tumors in his brain as well in just a few short months. So, with the combined radiation and especially the novel immunotherapy treatments that have evolved in recent years, one cancer, at least, seems to be treatable. It has been glacially slow for progress like this to be made on other forms of the disease, especially ovarian cancer which is still impossible to detect early enough to do much about it.
So, we are celebrating Christmas this year with a light heart and gratitude for small and big miracles. I’d say this one was pretty big though, wouldn’t you?
Merry Christmas everybody!
This is a metal branch chandelier that I found at Crate & Barrel last Christmas. It looked nice then with about thirty ornaments of various colors and sizes hung at different lengths. This year, I came upon some extraordinarily beautifully made animal ornaments in a shop in Cambridge when my daughter and I had lunch for her birthday this past weekend.
I woke up the following morning and thought about transforming the branch chandelier this year into groupings of these wild and domesticated animal ornaments. Playing around with them, we clustered the five reindeer in a herd at the center with a gaggle of three geese with wreaths around their necks on one end. The result so far is an asymmetrical one that we both find rather pleasing.
And we will undoubtedly tweak it ever so often for the remaining ten days until Christmas!
Happy Holidays to one and all!
Here’s Round Three attempt to make cheese crackers for our granddaughter, A., who’s looking at exams soon at JHU where she is a sophomore. When she was a freshman, she told me that her favorite snack was Cheezit crackers. I sent her a bunch but this year, I saw Ree Drummond (Pioneer Woman) make homemade cheese crackers for her daughter, Paige, who’s a freshman at college. She made hers by cutting squares with a hole made in the middle with a skewer. My first attempt looked terrible but tasted good.
The second batch that I made this past weekend didn’t taste good because I used a different kind of cheese which was already grated (big mistake) and I added too much seasoning salt and cayenne pepper. They were so hot I didn’t use the other half batch of the dough.
This time, I went back to using 8 oz. of Vermont Cabot Seriously Sharp Cheddar Cheese in a block that I grated myself. A stick of very cold unsalted butter cut up, one cup flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon seasoned Lawry’s garlic salt and a pinch of cayenne pepper and 2 tablespoons ice water are the rest of the ingredients for this recipe. The mixing is easy, but the rolling and cutting out takes a little care and time. (Plus I forgot to make a hole in the middle with a skewer this time but they turned out crisp enough.)
After the butter and cheese are mixed (pulse until grainy) in a Cuisinart, add one cup of flour and seasonings; process to mix and add 2 tablespoons of ice water. It will process into a ball of dough. Wrap the dough into plastic wrap and chill for an hour. Roll out half of the dough to 1/8 inch thick and cut in squares with a pizza cutter or with a star cookie cutter. Make a hole in the center with a skewer (if you remember) and bake at 350 degrees for 12 minutes plus or minus.
They’re tasty! The cheese tasted good and next time I’ll add a pinch more cayenne pepper, having put too much in the last time and too little this time.
The only problem with them is that you can’t eat just a couple. And soon, they’re all gone!
Once they are completely cooled, I’ll scoop them into ziploc bags and stash them into the freezer. Tomorrow, I’ll pack them frozen into a small priority mailing box and send the cheese crackers to A. at school. Hope she likes ’em!
Here’s a photo of a “Waldorf”-type doll that we are giving to our five year old granddaughter for Christmas! (I don’t think she has access to this blog as yet so thought I’d post a sneak preview here.)
Made a couple of outfits for her today which entailed digging out my old sewing machine and learning all over again how to wind a bobbin and thread a sewing machine (Youtube was a lifesaver!) I had to use a magnifying glass and tweezers to thread the needle though.
It’s been over forty years since I did this for my daughters! Thank God our other granddaughter is at Johns Hopkins University! Yeah!
Sometimes I find myself holding on to things that were given to us at Christmas one year and refresh them with new plantings. Here’s a box with “Joy” that Caitlin and Tom gave us a few years ago (when we made the Judy Rodgers’ roast chicken with bread salad for Christmas Eve.) Here it is replanted with a few narcissus paperwhite bulbs.
And, at the Stop and Shop in Shrewsbury this afternoon, I happened upon a small poinsettia similar to those impressionistic ones that I posted the other day.
These are my favorite variety of poinsettias.
I don’t know if they have a name but they look like someone waved an impressionist magic wand over them. Kind of scarce too – so when I saw these at Stop & Shop this week, I had to get them!
They’re in a flower cutting basket that reflect in the mirror behind it.
Christmas must be approaching!
mulberryshoots 