That other thing I do

Fiber content? I got nothin'.

All the knitting going on in these parts is still top-secret, and I haven't even had time to take Molly for a test spin.

For the past two days, I have been in a cleaning and decorating frenzy. Andy's mom is coming for Christmas, and while I do try to keep the apartment's resemblance to a pigsty to a bare minimum, standards had to be raised to mother level.

We don't have that many Christmas decorations, because we don't spend Christmas here very often. This year, however, Andy's mom doesn't want to be at her home for Christmas, while my dad wants to be alone at his, so we are trying to accommodate everybody's wishes. I am looking forward to Christmas. It's my favourite time of the year.

So, in a desperate attempt tp make up for the lack of content, I've got a few pictures that will never make it into home decoration magazines. I'm calling the style "Oh shit, we just have baubles and not much else".

Uh, that last picture? This is NOT my idea of a decorated tree. That still needs to be done. Looking at the other decorations, I realize this fact might not be obvious to everybody. If you are experiencing a panic attack right now, you are most likely not a German reader. Rest assured, many Germans don't put up their trees until a few days before Christmas.

Holiday spirit and all - also still due to lack of real content - I thought I'd share with you a bit of the other stuff I do with my time, the one thing I love even more than fiber arts, which means, of course, that I'll never be a capital Knitter :o). Instead of traditional Christmas cards or letters, my friends get a Christmas story every year. It is not the only project I work on all year long, although this year's will be close to it. Words had a way of coming hard in the past few months. Some things, I found, are too big to be written about right now or shoved aside to resume the regularly scheduled writing program.

A few weeks ago, I came up with the plan to post a few of those Christmas stories. They are also over there on the sidebar listed by year. Not so much for an audience - there are about three and half people out there reading this blog (hi :o), and none of them may be Christmas story people, for all I know. Putting the stories up here gave me an excuse to look at them over the past weeks, rereading them, tweaking them, gently easing myself back into the program, as it were, so that the moments of quiet concentration are no longer filled with the big stuff I can't find words about. Well, it sorta worked. The big stuff is still there, but I got used to it.

So, enjoy, if you have a mind to, I'm off to take a hatchet to that tree trunk.