My Handmade Holidays

With all my traveling, sewing, soap making and present wrapping, i missed out on participating in much handmade holiday conversation here at Not Dabbling, so my post this week will be a run down of all the projects i worked on this year. Check out An Austin Homestead in the next week or two to [...]

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Winding down….

I don’t know about the rest of you, but we’re still winding down from Christmas.   We were able to spend a lot of time with our family, which was truly a blessing.  I’m the oldest of 6 kids.  I have 2 younger bio sisters as well as 2 younger sisters and a younger brother who [...]

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Real holidays: Happy New Year!

We had our friends Steve and Gayle over for the holidays last week (here’s the meal we made). Our grown daughter and their two grown sons (one of whom played Simon Birch just as an aside!) were over too, and we told them about a New Year’s Eve in about 1979 or 1980, when, as [...]

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Merry and Bright

I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day. We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year. As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year. And thus I drift along into the holidays – let [...]

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A walk down memory lane…

A few days ago, I went up to the attic and pulled out two reindeer to sit on our table. The table is sitting in the middle of the kitchen right now (not its normal spot). Somehow, I didn’t plan too well and we had all 22 of our windows replaced a week ago. Every [...]

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Here’s to longer days and the light of hope. . .

I have been feeling the weight of the short days and dark nights. Wrapping up our first whole year as farmers has been interesting. Intense moments of extreme frustration and system failures combined with those moments I live for, at the farmers market when a mother with her three children approaches our table and thanks [...]

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This, the shortest day, we slop through the mud

“Winter is icumen in, Lhude sing Goddamm, Raineth drop and staineth slop, And how the wind doth ramm! Sing: Goddamm.” Ezra Pound Rejoice, sun-lovers! (And forgive me if my quote offends; I have a lot of Appalachian roots; this really spoke to me.) Today is the shortest day of the year. From this point on [...]

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My 2011 Handmade/Homemade Christmas Roundup

It was a matter of course that the lucky one whose holiday (birthday) came around could expect a present from everyone in the house; and of course, one didn’t just go to the store and buy with cold money something turned out by a factory with no relationship at all to the young sister or [...]

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‘Tis the season

Even in a non-religious household like mine, it’s important to remember the religious, cultural and spiritual underpinnings of this most dear of holiday seasons.  Forgotten in modern consumer focused holidays, is that Christmas is a season and not just a day. We tend to think of Christmas as happening on December 24 and 25th, and [...]

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Personalizing Gift Tags

At our house in Michigan, we’re spending the next few days wrapping and decorating all the gifts we’ll be giving over the next couple of weeks. It seems I just don’t get along with the cost of wrapping paper and gift tags, so instead I try to reuse when possible or use up what I [...]

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