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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Quote of the Day: Laura Ingalls Wilder
One morning the whole world was delicately silvered. Every blade of grass was silvery and the path had a thin sheen. It was hot like fire under Laura’s bare feet, and they left dark footprints in it. The air was cold in her nose and her breath steamed. So did Spot’s. When the sun came up, the whole prairie sparkled. Millions of tiny, tiny, sparks of color blazed on the grasses.
It seems like winter has been long in coming this year. Lately we’ve been waking up to a heavy frost blanketing the ground and the temperatures in the 20’s. It’s a beautiful thing for sure, I love seeing the frost glittering as the run rises.
I’m excited for winter, both for the snow that brightens this dark season and for the sweet rest it provides. I’m a seasonal gal for sure. I keep telling Mr Chiots that I really want to take up snowshoeing because I love being outside in the cold so much during this season.
What’s your favorite cold weather activity?
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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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Getting a Little Political
In general, I keep my political views to myself with the exception of a few friends. Recently the oil/gas industry has been moving into our county and some of the leaders in our small lake community are trying to get all of us members to sign over our mineral rights. For a while we felt like the only people who were against it until we saw a sign in our neighbors yard. We stopped and talk to them and now we’re on the committee against the oil/gas leases for our community to try to protect our lake and our community from the risk of polluted water, excess truck traffic and the host of other problems that follow in the wake of this industry.
We’re already seeing scenes like this a few miles from our home. Instead of getting stuck behind a tractor on the road it’s now gas/oil trucks flying by. There are around 250 frack water storage tanks in town right by the river and the water treatment plant. There are a few wells being drilled not that far from our home. They’re also putting in a pipeline in our county, right through the farm where we went yesterday to get our Christmas tree.
Let me explain a little about where we live. Chiot’s Run is located in a gated lake community called Lake Mohawk outside of Malvern, OH. We have a beautiful lake, beaches, ski clubs, fishing clubs, a small golf course and lots of other groups. It’s a large community with about 900 households. About two thirds of those are residents who, like us, live here year round, the rest live elsewhere with their homes here being their lake/summer homes. Many of the year-round residents have lived here their whole lives as children and now as adults. As a result it’s a varied and interesting community and our property values are quite stable and higher than the surrounding fairly depressed areas. The problem with the gas/oil industry, is the pollution that inevitably comes along with it. If our lake gets polluted, our small community is ruined. Our property values will tank and we’ll be left with quite a mess on our hands.
We have now have a sign in our yard (during the allowed sign posting times, we do have an HOA after all). We’re hoping that other residents will see our sign and know that they’re not alone in their opposition. Chances are that we’re going to be on the losing side of this battle, but at least we won’t go down without making our voices heard. We won’t sign away our mineral rights here at Chiot’s Run and risk polluting our community, even if everyone else does. Sadly that means we will mostly move along to another community. We simply don’t want to live with the risks of drinking polluted water and air.
It’s been a depressing couple weeks as we talk about it. You see, we don’t really want to move. We love Ohio, we like our community, we have worked at setting deep roots over the past 13 years. We have a thriving local food web and we hesitate to leave all that behind. While we never thought we’d live out the rest of our days here at Chiot’s Run, we figured we’d always live here in eastern Ohio. It will certainly be a lot of hard work to regrow those roots in another area. When you transplant something it usually takes a season or two to bounce back to it’s original form. Last night while we were on our evening walk we talked about how we need to start looking at it as a blessing; often the toughest times in our lives turn out to make the most positive difference later down the road. Who knows where we will be five years from now, but I’m confident we’ll be enjoying ourselves and the challenges before us and I’m sure you’ll still be along for the ride!
We’re not sure what will happen or where we’ll end up, the good thing is that we’re both self-employed and work from home which means we can go anywhere with an internet connection. We’ve long talked about buying a place in Maine and may do that, but we’re open to other options (we’d love to stay in the northeast). I’m voting for somewhere close to good seafood! The good thing is that we’re proactive people, so we won’t sit around and complaining. Now the process begins of starting to get a few projects done around the house just in case we want to sell and we start planning for future possibilities.
What challenges have you been facing in your community? Any great suggestions folks? Where to go, where not to go?
