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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‘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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Adventures in Jelly Making

When I decided to go local and package-free, one of the things I had to do was learn to make sweets, since I have the sweet tooth to end all sweet tooths (sweet teeth?). This has been a less-than-successful effort. While I’m pretty good with cookies, my quick breads never cook all the way through [...]

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REAL Holidays: Making Fabric Napkins

I learned to sew when I was 15 or 16 years old. My mom bought me a machine (the same one I still use) and I had some basic lessons from the store where the machine came from – more to familiarize you with your new machine that actually teaching you how to sew. I [...]

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Handmade Gifts for a REAL Holiday: Making Cards

The holiday season is upon us. One of the gifts I decided to give my nieces this year is cards. At first I thought I would make them each a stack of personalized “monogrammed” cards. Then I realized that they are at a point (8 and 10 years old) where they like projects and new [...]

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Don’t buck the system

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Needless to say, I love the cooking part, especially as my sister-in-law and mother-in-law are also fantastic cooks. Since one is Hungarian and the other Chinese, and I’m Greek, we have some very very interesting family dinners under our belts. But apparently, you don’t mess with Thanksgiving traditions, especially among [...]

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A Thanksgiving Dinner

We have so many sisters here now, that the table is too crowded for just one person to make a meal. So we’re making our own Thanksgiving dinner, and sharing it with you. *** For some reason, about 5 years ago my family (it’s Xan by the way) decided that they are completely in love [...]

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Sweet Giftings: Herb Infused Sugars

As the holidays approach, I’m finding myself making mental timelines for gift-making. I’ve got lots of little homemade gifts in mind for this year, which is good because I’m pretty sure several of my family members follow this blog so they still won’t know what’s coming their way – just what might be. The importance [...]

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A bit of dabbling in South Texas

Is this really true?  Pinch me? Am I really writing here with all these other wonderful contributors? What an honor. My husband and I have been living north of San Antonio on the edge of the Hill Country for almost four years. When I arrived here I really wasn’t sure what I was going to [...]

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