One Week to Christmas

One week to Christmas.  I don't have a single gift yet and the Christmas cards are still on the dining room table.  The only thing that has changed is that Fred and I are now at each other's throats.  He wants to mail the cards, and of course, with my writer's block, I don't. 

I have baked 15 pounds of sugar cookies; that's 15 pounds on my hips, not on the tray.  My sugar cookies, a recipe from America's Test Kitchen, are good enough for the dog and me to eat but not good enough to give away.  Although I have read everything I could find about making them, every batch comes out dense, flat, and much too sweet.  Every single time.   This is despite the fact that my butter is precisely 65 degrees when I start and the room is 64; I cool my cookie sheets between batches; I have opened two new tins of baking powder; I have beaten the butter and sugar for 3 minutes, 5 minutes, and finally 10 minutes.  What I do doesn't make a lick of difference -- the cookies are embarrassing.  So I am giving up.  I can't bake cookies forever.  Fred's officemates are not going to eat them forever.  Not the way they are.  This will not be the year when I give away tins of pretty cookies. 

Today I worked on Fred's decal instead.  He wants to give sweatshirts to his surfer friends with a decal that says, surf for life.  He doesn't realize how much time that can take, especially me, who is slow at everything.  I have looked at fonts and found some graphics on the web.  Maybe when he gets home we can put them together and get this thing on the road. 

Christmas is just a week away.

A Christmas Note

We hope all are warm and well at your house, as we are here on our little farm. 

It has been a good year for us, for the most part, though hard at times.  A grand spring brought tall, wet grass for our horse and donkeys and freed Fred and me to travel, him with his surfboard to Costa Rica and me with my walking shoes to the Saint James Trail across northern Spain.  Then, the summer broke my heart.  It took my beloved Gwynnydonk who had been my companion and confessor for 21 years.  We buried her beneath the treeline of the pasture, and now when I look out the window, I see just one horse and one donkey and a mound of red clay slowly melting into the ground where Gwynny used to stand.

Already on the day we buried her, the fall was coming on with spectacular beauty.  I don’t know why, but the season has been just breathtaking.  This time of year, we are mostly at home.  We walk in the evenings.  Fred has his fires in the fireplace, the dog and cat spraw in front of it, and eggnog warms in the microwave.  I am occupied with my new paella pan, experimenting with shellfish and veggies.  I love paella because it puts just one big dish on the table; it is a food of community, like breaking bread or sharing wine. 

Fred spent last weekend stretched out on the couch reading The Mighty Eighth, a collection of WWII memoirs, while I baked sugar cookies and sat at the dining room table grinding away at Christmas cards.  These will be the first cards I have sent in many years.  I don't know what has come over me.

We are waiting for winter now — snow is just to the south and west of us — and looking forward to the longer days that Christmas will bring.  Here in the bare-branched silence behind our garden gate, I guess we are growing older.

And so goes another year.  Ho, ho, ho!  A merry Christmas to you all.  We think of you often, always with best wishes.