Getting Ready for Christmas

It seems like we’ve been getting ready for the holiday since Thanksgiving! I don’t know how people with kids do it. I didn’t even bake cookies, which I think is de rigeur once you have little cookie gobblers running around. We bought and put up our tree last week on the coldest day of the year. We choose the first one we saw at King Soopers and tied it rapidly to the top of the car, just trying to get out of the cold. It turned out to be a cute little tree!

That night, we put Taco in the garage. He only gets to be in there about twice a year, and it takes a fair amount of cramming to get him, Tatonka, and the five bikes (plus the saw, tables, shelves, storage cupboards, wood rack, etc.) all in.

No cookies, but I have done a fair amount of cooking—stay tuned for those results after Christmas. Speaking of cooking, I put a beef stew in the crock pot yesterday for dinner. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out all that well. The meat, potatoes, onions, and carrots were perfectly cooked, but it wasn’t thick enough. Not enough flour, maybe? The “broth” was kind of lumpy and greasy, but all in all it was tasty.

As I mentioned, it’s been just freezing here lately, which we Boulderites are not used to. Dave and I are sitting at The Cup, a coffee shop on Pearl Street, and my toes are numb. So I’ve been cooking winter comfort food—stuffed peppers, no peek chicken, stew. I’d love to make some chicken paprikash, but I made it for Dave once in college and he made fun of it (orange!), so I’ve never tried again.

We finally got our Christmas letters in the mail yesterday, after spending last week writing, printing, and stamping. I planned to use the paper folder at church to make that part a bit quicker, and I was already there for the Rainbow Child Care holiday program (just as cute as can be!), so I ran some scrap paper through to try it out. First I couldn’t figure out where to put the paper. Then I could only get it to make one fold. I booted up the laptop sitting in the office and Googled the Martin Yale paper folder. After a bit of digging around, I found a little video that was supposed to show me what to do. I watched that about six times, but could never figure out why I could only make one fold. I finally decided that it just must not work that way, and started running the sheets through a second time. It took another several minutes and tries to figure out how to get the “Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays” part on the outside. Finally I started sending the real Christmas letter through, but the paper folder was making a long wrinkle on most of the copies. I did about fifty and decided that it hadn’t been that much trouble to fold them by hand, especially since I was going to have to unfold them to write a message and then fold them back up. I left the rest alone. Whew!

We got the packages into the mail on Friday morning and spent Saturday morning at the coffee shop getting the letters ready to go. With a sinking heart, I realized that it would be better on the environment to send them out by e-mail, but who wants to get an e-mail PDF as a Christmas letter? The pleasure of keeping in touch in a more old-fashioned way is one of the charms of Christmas, so I let myself off the hook. Once the letters were safely at the post office, we headed over to church, where Dave needed to reinstall an operating system on the youth leader’s computer. I brought a book: God: Stories, which I bought at Powell’s Books in Portland. So far, the individual stories are gorgeously written but depressing as hell. I hope that at least one or two people will turn out to have been positively affected by faith! It’s true that sometimes the characters have been carried through difficult circumstances by it, but I’m looking for something transcendent, luminous—numinous.

When Dave was done with the computer, we thought about going to the movies, so we stopped to see what was playing and then ended up at the bookstore (worried that a movie would take too long and dinner would be overcooked). We stoked up the stove and slept in our sleeping bags on the living room floor for fun on Saturday night. Sunday morning I read the lessons at church and then we headed to The Cup. And now we’re back to the beginning of this post—me freezing my toes off while sipping a latte.