A Cheery Delight
Most years, my front porch is all decorated this time of year with fresh pine greenery, big white Christmas lights, grapevine stars, terra cotta pots, pinecones, and all things natural. I spend the better part of a day outside stringing garland and lights and adding a touch of the holidays to our home.
This year however, my front porch is bare, there is no pine garland, no white lights, and no grapevine stars. I never got around to buying the garland and I haven’t been able to find the time to pull out the stars. It’s kind of sad, I really miss the big white lights shining through the front windows during the evening. I didn’t want to go completely without any outside lights, that makes me sad.
We are not completely devoid of holiday cheer in the garden. Some big colored lights were strung in a small blue spruce out back for our Christmas card photo.
Generally I’m not a colored light kind of gal, but I find them to be a cheery delight when I see them through my kitchen window in the evenings.
The nice thing about this little strand of lights is that no one else can see them but us. It’s like our own little holiday display on the back hillside. The extra nice thing is that it will take me all of two minutes to take down the outdoor holiday decor instead of the usual couple hours.
Do you add any outdoor decor/lights to your home during the holidays? Which do you prefer: white or colored lights?
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Getting Creative with our Christmas Cards
I love getting photos of all my friends kids via their Christmas cards, it’s a great way to keep up with what’s going on in their lives. Mr Chiots and I don’t have children, so we don’t have to send out the obligatory family photo for Christmas. Each year I spend all year trying come up with something creative to do. That’s the one problem with having a really great card one year, then people expect it every subsequent year! This year, we decided that since our camper was a big part of our summer, it should be featured on our holiday card.
My original idea was to have the camper parked in a snowy field with us sitting around a fire nearby. However, we have had no measurable snow, that means I had to come up with something slightly different because it was getting close to the cut off time for ordering the cards.
I spent the night before last outside for about an hour at dusk taking a variety of photos trying to get just the the right ones for our card. Of course there was a self portrait or two that didn’t make the final card.
I can’t wait to get the final cards in the mail. Each year, it’s pure joy to address them and send them off to my friends & family. Coming up with a creative card is one of the things I really enjoy doing for Christmas. I’ll show you what the final product looks like next week after we receive the final cards.
Do you send out family photo cards, handmade cards, pre-made cards from the store, e-cards, or no cards during the holidays?
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Holiday Baking Party
Being an introvert, social occasions are not high on my list of things to do, especially if they will be attended by a large group of people that I don’t know. You see as a introvert social activities, especially those with lots of people and folks I don’t know really wear me out; I’m exhausted the entire next day. So when my friend Sofie, aka The German Foodie, invited me to a baking party I had to think about it before agreeing to go. I decided that I was going to suck it up, bake some cookies, and head over to meet some interesting new people. I baked up a batch of my Super Spicy Gingerbread Men and was ready to go.
There were tons of people there, both kids and adults. The kids had a great time decorating cookies with a variety of colors of icing and sprinkles of all colors, shapes and sizes – what kid wouldn’t want to be able to decorate each and every cookie differently?
Lots of people brought cookies already made, some brought dough, and other mixed up cookies while we were there. The oven was on for the entire 5 hours I was there, churning out cookies all afternoon and some delicious homemade pizza later in the evening.
I’m glad I went and had a wonderful time. Was I tired the next day, absolutely. But I met lots of new interesting people and had a lot of great conversations. You see, Sofie’s friends are very varied and interesting. I think I counted 3 or 4 different languages being spoken throughout the event, and conversation topics from Argentinian political history and what kind of King Arthur flour works best for artisan bread to a long conversation about growing edibles in a cold frame all winter long. As a Colombian with a very eclectic life experience I fit right in. I even got to teach Sofie how to throw pizza dough to make a nice thin crust.
Have you baked any holiday cookies yet? Any holiday parties?
If you’d like to see more photos from the event head on over to my Facebook page and look through the album.
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It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas
This past Thursday, Mr Chiots and I went down to the local farm to get our Christmas tree (yep we still call it that not a “holiday tree”). It’s a cute little place, run by an old man and his wife. We had planned on going earlier in the week, but it was raining. Thursday turned out to be a beautiful day, sunny and bright with beautiful blue skies. It was cold too, except for a lack of snow on the ground, it was the perfect day.
We walked around and selected the perfect little frasier fir. I voted for a charlie brown one, but Mr Chiots is more keen on the full ones, he won.
Mr Chiots and I are serial entrepreneurs so we always talk about ways we’d improve businesses when we are at them. We’ve also talked about having a little Christmas tree farm someday. We talked about all the ways we could make our farm the most festive and best one around from having local hot cider and delicious cookies on hand to making garland and wreaths from tall the trimmings for an additional revenue stream.
We chatted for a while with the man that owns the farm, mainly disussing the oil/gas industry. He signed over all of his mineral rights and it looks like the big Keystone pipline is being laid right through the middle of the farm.
We packed up our little tree into the car along with a few armloads of extra branches to decorate the rest of the house and we set off toward home.
Out came the heirloom cast iron tree stand that my parents used to use and the evening was spent adding a few pearly white twinkle lights and a few etched glass balls to our tree. Red glass beaded garland finished it off and our perfectly simple Christmas tree is now filling our home with the a warm glow and the wonderful scent of pine. I was happy to spot a tiny little spider while decorating the tree.
What kind of tree graces your home during the holidays?
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Christmas in Zoar 2011
Mr Chiots and I always kick off our holiday season by going to Christmas in Zoar. We usually plan ahead and go with friends, but this year time got away from us and we didn’t realize it was happening until Sunday around noon. We put the coffee we were drinking into to-go mugs, jumped in the car and headed down for an afternoon of holiday fun. It’s a great way to get into the spirit because all the houses are decorated beautifully for Christmas outside and in. Each year there are a few houses on tour, we’ve been going for so long we’ve toured almost every home. It’s truly a fantastic way to get into the Christmas spirit. Here’s a slideshow of all the Christmas we saw on Sunday afternoon. Here’s a slideshow to help get you into the Christmas spirit. You’ll notice there are garden photos in there as well, I can’t help myself! (use icon in the top left corn to view in full screen). Be patient, there are 60 photos to get you in the Christmas spirit!
[flashgallery folder=”Christmas in Zoar”]
The gardens of Zoar are also lovely and I’m always hoping to go to their summer garden tour, sadly we’re always working on the Saturday they have it and they don’t announce it far enough ahead of time for me to book events around it. Hopefully later today we’ll head out to get our Christmas tree, then it will officially be the Christmas season at Chiot’s Run.
Do you have any holiday traditions that officially kick off the season for you?
