Want to jam out to some Christmas music for free?

Just a quick FYI ---Amazon is giving away a free Christmas song on MP3 everyday through Christmas.  Yay!  You can get such greatest hits as Twisted Sister's Deck the Halls.  I hurt my neck from all the head banging I just did. :-)


There's also some more normal ones too like Mannheim Steamroller's gorgeous rendition of Greensleeves, a pretty version of O Holy Night by someone named Leigh Nash, and Celtic Woman (they're always on PBS!) singing Ave Maria.  


Enjoy!

In the land of obnoxious Christmas letters...

The Cobbler and I in our 2003 Christmas letter photo during the end of my blonde phase.

Do Christmas letters annoy you or do you love them?  I fall into both camps depending on who the letter is coming from.  I have read about literally everything from won horseback riding tournaments and soccer games to a cancer diagnosis.  Yep, I once received a generic Christmas letter from a friend announcing she had cancer.  I debate every year about whether or not I'll write one, but then I look back at all the ones I've written going back to 2003 and think about how much things have changed since then.  Each letter is like a year put on ice for me.  It cracks me up how the letters were initially all about me and the Cobbler and what little we did aside from our jobs to all about the kids today.  Just for kicks, here are some highlights from our letters of the past---


2003:  With both of us working and no kids, I actually devoted an entire paragraph to our job descriptions.  That must have been a thrilling read for the relatives.


2004: We went to Italy for two weeks that fall and found out Red was on the way.  We got our cats too and I described them as "challenging---as baby animals tend to be."  That also was the Christmas that Pumpkin climbed the Christmas tree and took up residence there.


2005: Red is 6 months old when this letter goes out.  Here are my favorite sentences.  This one is regarding Red --- "Her musical tastes range from classical to the great nap inducer Celine Dion to disco.  Her current favorite song is “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen."  And about the cats I write--- "We were initially nervous about how they would react to Red, but we are relieved to report that they have adopted her as one of their own...Oliver is constantly trying to groom her (licking her head would be one of his favorite pastimes if I let him), and Pumpkin watches Red take her bath every night (although it may be just so she can drink the bath water)."


2006: A whole paragraph is devoted in depth to Red's vocabulary (again, probably a snoozer for the relatives), declaring her favorite words to say as "cracker and cookie."


2007: Tom Thumb was born this year.  There's a paragraph gushing about how he "lights up any room with his smile" and Red's room was clearly a fire hazard because "her bed is so jammed with books there is hardly room for her to sleep!"


2008:  My fave passage about Red  is "Her obsession with pirates is entering its eighth month.  She just finally let me remove the skull and cross bones tattoo that she has had on since Halloween."  About Tom Thumb I wrote "He also likes anything that has buttons (e.g. TV remotes, the telephone).  If we didn’t watch him like a hawk, everything would be broken.  We are now convinced that he is either going to be a professional singer (he is constantly making yodeling noises) or the next Olympic gold medalist in swimming."  I wrote about how I was reupholstering our living room furniture and I hoped I would finish before the kids entered high school.  On a good note, that is one unfinished project that has actually been completed since then...but I don't think I actually finished until the following summer.


2009: "The Queen of Mischief has found a perfect minion in her brother.  If there’s crayon on the wall, cookies missing from the jar, or the shampoo bottle is empty even though it was full before their bath, Red's first response is “Tom Thumb did it!”  And he probably did do it, but definitely with some help from his big sister. "


2010: "Red spends her free time singing loudly, interpretive dancing (it’s a hoot), reading, and making art out of anything and I mean anything.  Tom Thumb practices daily to be a future super spy by climbing on counters, discovering new ways to eat peanut butter, stealing bananas then jamming them in his mouth to destroy the evidence, and commandeering any available electronic devices (including the Cobbler’s cell phone, the GPS, etc.) for his own secret missions.  At his side through it all is Blue Blankie, his well worn baby blanket which he loses every single day and then cries until I find it.  I told the Cobbler for Christmas I want a tracking device for it so I don’t lose my mind."


And now we're up to our 2011 Christmas letter.  For those of you among my readers who know you'll be receiving a hard copy of this, you can close your eyes.  As for everyone else, I unveil our very own obnoxious holiday letter---the 2011 edition:

"Red entered first grade this year.  She wishes she could go to school for a couple of hours and then spend the rest of the day at home playing with me and Tom Thumb.  She enjoys taking jazz and Hawaiian dance classes weekly and has joined her school’s Girl Scout troop.  Red spends her spare time singing and dancing in front of the mirror in our living room, reading, drawing fairy castles, and building forts out of couch cushions with Tom Thumb.  At the top of her Christmas list are “minerals and diamonds.”  Obviously, she thinks she’s been extra good this year!

We don’t know how Tom Thumb continues to grow taller when it seems like he never eats!  His latest hobby is disagreeing with everyone about everything.  If he asks us if a stop sign is red and we say yes, he’ll say, “No, it isn’t.”  His other favorite is “No, I willn’t.”  Some days I feel like we’re trapped in a Charles Dickens’ novel with his choice of archaic English.  Tom Thumb started taking tae kwon do in August in a preschool class called “Little Dragons.”  He earned his yellow belt in November and was thrilled since his favorite color is yellow.  When at home and not debating me, Tom Thumb likes playing board games and covering the floor of his room with train tracks.  Tom Thumb is asking Santa for “a yellow dump truck and a yellow gumball.”

The Cobbler completed building his electric car using a 2001 Focus body in the spring.  The Cobbler and his car with its “ELECTRC” vanity plate were the talk of the neighborhood all summer.  My time was spent in an unending battle against dirt and laundry, while running the kids to their classes and volunteering at Red's school.  I had a goal of reading 52 books this year and I’ve finished 44 so I still have a remote shot at making it.  If not, there’s always next year!  My favorite book this year was “Let the Great World Spin” by Colum McCann.  Read it. You’ll like it!

So what do you think?  Obnoxious or just right?  Too late!  It's already printed---ha ha!  

In the end, I like our Christmas letters.  This letter is like my very own time capsule.  Is it gushing?  Yes.  Does it leave out some of the harder moments?  Definitely.  But what do you want to remember most?  I choose the beautiful moments 2011 has given me.

Getting ready to celebrate St. Nicholas Day

Our family has celebrated St. Nicholas day on December 6th since the children were small.  My husband and I LOVE Christmas!  He loves to decorate the outside of the house (I think Clark Griswold is his inspiration), we have a large Department 56 Village that we've collected over the years, and we especially love Santa Claus.  Although I figured out my mother was Santa because they had the same handwriting, the Cobbler was told by a Sunday School teacher that Santa wasn't real when he was in 1st grade.  


I always wanted our kids to grow up knowing that Santa Claus was a real person so they weren't in for a shock when they were older.  Over the years we have emphasized that Santa Claus or St. Nicholas actually lived and that people do kind things for each other or give gifts at Christmas to emulate him.  Every year we read them the same books from the library about Saint Nicholas around this time of year.  


Our first pick is usually The Legend of St. Nicholas by Demi.  This book is the most religious in tone of our three books we read and focuses on St. Nicholas's sainthood.  It covers St. Nicholas's entire life, including his childhood and also some of the more macabre stories like the murder and pickling of the boys who St. Nicholas then resurrects.  Red, who is a kid who really digs church, loves this one.  She even insists on saying the prayer to St. Nicholas that is printed the end of the book---and we're not even Catholic!

Our next pick is a biography by Ann Tompert simply titled St. Nicholas.  This book is in more of a biography format and has some really interesting illustrations that are intended to look like mosaics.  Again, this book covers his life in its entirety and discusses his miracles, but takes a much less religious approach and explains his life in a more "here's the facts ma'am" narrative.

Finally, my favorite is Santa Who? by Gail Gibbons.  It talks about the origins of Christmas and its legends.  The author talks about who St. Nicholas was, how his persona was developed into Sinter Cleas in Holland and then Santa Claus, how December 25 was chosen as the date for Christmas, and how Santa Claus is depicted in America and in other countries.


I so look forward to December 6th.  We usually read all three books, but particularly stress the story of the three impoverished maidens, from which the tradition of hanging stockings comes.  Then, Red and Tom Thumb put their shoes on the fireplace mantel before they go to bed.  We fill their shoes with gold chocolate coins and they get a new Christmas book.  This year's book is The Twelve Days of Christmas in Michigan.

I'm really looking forward to reading it to them!  If you want a treasure trove of information about St. Nicholas and different ways to commemorate his day (December 6), go to The St. Nicholas Center website.  It's fantastic!

Turkey Lurkey! It's time for Thanksgiving books!

Here are our family's picks for fave Thanksgiving books we've read this month---

When a town is reduced to considering shredded wheat as their Thanksgiving dinner, they hatch a plan to catch their "plump and perky turkey" by recruiting a turkey as a model for a turkey tribute art festival.  Hi jinx ensue!

The ugly pumpkin is devastated when he isn't picked to be a jack o' lantern for Halloween, but things start looking up around Thanksgiving when he realizes that he's a SQUASH!

Speaking of turkey, Thanksgiving dinner will be at my parents' house like every year.  And like every year, I must assume that we won't be offered any leftovers.  I know it's shocking, but they like to keep all the leftovers for themselves!  As a result (and by the Cobbler's request), Thanksgiving the Remix will be happening at our house on Friday.  If I was going to cook a turkey, it wasn't going to be one that's jacked up on hormones and antibiotics and raised in the equivalent of a dark room. Amazingly, I was able to find a fresh, free range, organic turkey in the city!  It was a little bit weird having Tom Thumb socialize along the fence with some turkeys that are going to be on someone's dining room table on Thursday, but we had a pretty awesome experience at Roperti's Turkey Farm.  One of the employees even carried our turkey to my car!  As my vegetarian alternative, I'm planning on making this yummy looking veggie streudel on Thursday.  Let the good times roll!

Book Review: Let the Great World Spin

Before I get into my review, I have to share a few images with you---

It always amazes me the variety of covers a book may have depending upon the country of its release.  Why the red-orange line drawing of the New York City skyline topped off by the tightrope walker on the U.S. cover, while Europe gets the guy doing the back bend or the man lying down on the tightrope?


When I first found out my book club was reading Let the Great World Spin for our November meeting, I was under the impression the book was about tightrope walking.  I guess that's a logical conclusion since there's a tightrope walker in all the cover art.  So when I started reading the book and the author opened the book with two Irish brothers Corrigan and Cieran, I kept trying to figure out who was going to end up being the tight rope guy.  It turns out the answer is neither.


Let the Great World Spin is set in Vietnam era New York City.  Corrigan is a member of a monastic order and he lives in the projects trying to help prostitutes.  His brother Cieran comes from Ireland to live with him.  The first seventy pages of the book sets up their relationship and Corrigan's relationship with others.  A tragic incident occurs at the end of the chapter.  I was waiting anxiously to see what happened next, but I didn't get to find out just then because the next chapter was about Claire.


Claire is a woman who lives in a Park Avenue penthouse who lost her son in Vietnam.  She's a member of a group of women who have all lost children to the war who periodically meet for coffee and breakfast.  It really was an abrupt jump for me.  What about Corrigan and Cieran?  What happened to them?  At this point, I was a bit frustrated with the author but decided to read on.  I didn't get to read anymore about Claire though because the third chapter was about Lara and Blaine.


The book continued this way---each chapter from a different character's perspective.  The one thing that seemed to unite them was them all seeing or hearing about a tightrope walker up on a line between the World Trade Center Towers.  The more you read, however, the more you find out that it isn't the tightrope walker who is connecting them all.  They were all already connected.


Let the Great World Spin is one of those books that when you finally realize what's happening (in this case, that all the characters are linked in some way) you can't wait to get to the next chapter.  I was a fan of the TV show Lost when it was airing and it had a similar format as this book.  In each episode, you would get some background on a character and then it would turn out that they're linked to someone else on the island.  It's the same situation here.  The author Colum McCann does an amazing job describing people and locations.  I'm not a person who normally can hear a character's voice in my head.  It's usually my own voice just reading the text.  While reading this book though, I actually felt like I could hear the characters speak.  He described New York City in such a way that the location actually became a character for me.  Because the characters develop more and more in each chapter (some that were mere supporting actors in the beginning get to tell their own story later in the book), you feel like you really know them by the end.  A hardened prostitute named Tillie becomes a grandmother desperate to see her grandchildren.  A rich white woman from the Upper East Side becomes close friends with a black woman from the Bronx.  A man can walk the tightrope between the twin towers and live.  Everything that is impossible is suddenly possible...or is it?  Ultimately, the book's message for me was that there is hope in all things no matter how dark the outlook is at the moment.


Even though it's the 44th book I've read this year, Let the Great World Spin is my favorite book so far.  It hands down beats everything else I've read and I highly recommend it.


I leave you with a line that comes near the end of the book that sums up the book's message for me:


"The world spins.  We stumble on.  It is enough."

Up to my ears in SAGE!---Harvesting and freezing herbs

Tom Thumb poses with the giant sage bush while opening his bag  to collect the herb harvest.

I'm a little tardy for the party this year in terms of harvesting herbs.  We have a small herb garden in our yard that is home to all my favorites --- parsley, basil, rosemary, thyme, chives, mint, oregano, and sage.  Our sage went absolutely BONKERS this year and became a small bush.  I finally cut it back today with Tom Thumb's help and also cut some of the remaining rosemary, thyme and oregano.

Here's the monster sage---

 My baby stick of rosemary...

 A ton of thyme...

I also learned my lesson about oregano---bury the pot it comes in underground with it.  My oregano is now a ground cover in the herb garden!


The real question though is what to do with this overabundance of sage?  I'll probably freeze most of it, but it has also inspired me to try to make my own smudge sticks.  My kitchen certainly could use some purification.  Maybe the kids would complain less about my cooking?  Ha ha!  So I'll hang some to dry as well.  I also found this link to 45 things to do with fresh sage.


After doing my research, here's the skinny on freezing fresh herbs:

First, wash those little stinkers.  Literally!  It smells so good in my kitchen!)

Then, pat dry.

Pick off all the wilted or brown or spotted leaves, if you haven't done it already.

Remove the rest of the leaves off the stems (except for thyme.  Leave those leaves attached).

Bag 'em, tag 'em, and toss 'em in the freezer.  

Voila---fresh herbs to add to recipes in the winter!

I finished the rosemary, thyme and a bit of oregano.  I think I could harvest oregano forever and still not run out.  The sage is resting peacefully on my counter awaiting my next move.

Tonight is Tom Thumb's belt test in karate for yellow belt---woo hoo!  Can't wait to report how that turns out.  

One more quick thing --- if you live near a Kroger grocery store, you must partake in some store brand salted caramel truffle ice cream.  Happiness on a spoon!

Preschool Read Aloud of the Week: Katie and the Sunflowers

I love books by James Mayhew!  I heard about them when Red was 3 or 4 and couldn't wait to check them out at the library.  At the time, I was really committed to the Charlotte Mason method and one of the things her philosophy advocates is picture study of great works of art.  Katie and the Sunflowers, along with Mayhew's other books, incorporates the works of famous artists into the book's plot.


I've been reading Katie and the Sunflowers to Tom Thumb this week and he loves it!  He wants to read "the sunflower book" before his nap everyday.  I don't mind because I love the story and the illustrations too.  In this book, Katie goes to the art museum with her grandmother.  She comes upon Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers, 

reaches out to touch it, and accidentally topples the vase of flowers out of the picture.  She enlists one of the dancing girls from Paul Gauguin's Breton Girls Dancing to help her put things back together.  

Things go from bad to worse when the dancing girl's dog runs off into the museum.  Fun and mayhem ensue with them stepping into more paintings to recover her dog before putting everything right again.  What a great book!  While our library has two of Mayhew's other Katie books (Katie Meets the Impressionists and Katie and the Mona Lisa.  Red especially liked the one with Mona Lisa!), I've been perusing his other Katie titles on Amazon and like what I see.  I think I may have found a Christmas gift or two for Red and Tom Thumb.  Yay!