‘Twas the day before Christmas…

…and I finally finished making and wrapping stuff for my kids.

My son and daughter each got a quilt–my son from squares of old mangled jeans, my daughter from felted wool sweaters cut into squares. (I need to go at hers with yarn and an embroidery needle, when I find one–the jeans quilt lies very nicely even without quilting the corners, but the wool one is too weirdly stretchy to quite pull that off.  Fortunately, I live with her, so I’ll be able to continue working on it a little even after she opens it.  I can’t find an embroidery needle anywhere, and NO WAY am I braving Joanne’s today to buy one…

They also each got new Christmas jammies–I’ll photograph them wearing them tonight or tomorrow morning, if I remember…but they are wrapped in “furoshiki” type wrapping, re-usable fabric wrap, instead of throwaway paper wrappings.

Christmas (or the holidays in general!) are a tough time to be green, for me…too much freneticism, even in my “simplify the mess” efforts, and sometimes I just throw up my hands in the moment and do things the easy way.  In fact, if I’ve learned nothing else in the past year or two of trying to decrease my and my family’s footprint a bit, it’s that the key is not about huge effort, it’s about early effort, it’s about keeping an eye on the big temporal picture, and taking the couple of minutes in advance to do things right, rather than taking the same couple of minutes at the last minute, to just say “oh what the hell.”  I have a lot more “what the hell” moments these days than I would like, but on the other hand this is a day when I’m enjoying the fruit of the things I did take time in weeks past to do, and in fact a day when I have a few minutes to drop a blog entry into the blogosphere….rare for me on Christmas Eve.

The next twenty four hours will be insane beyond insanity, and at least 24 hours after that I will probably be comatose, so I’m planning on disappearing from this blog for a few more days.

But in the meantime, hear me exclaim e’er I drop out of sight, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!’

Jenn