Month: December 2008

This year, one of the things I’ll be sending people home with from our family Chanukah supper are little packages of gelt. This year for the supper, my colors are going to be gold and Tiffany blue, so I bought a yard each of those colors in tulle plus some pretty gold ribbon:

Cut squares of each and layered the Tiffany blue over the gold, put three pieces of chocolate gelt in the middle of the squares, gathered up the squares at the top, tied the ribbon, and they’re all ready!

I’m thinking this would probably be a nice way to give out cookies, too – just wrap them in some cellophane, then into the tulle with ribbon…hmmm…

Last week, the B’ham News had an article about a employees at a company in Irondale decorating their cubicles for Christmas.

I used to work at a company where everyone had cubicles – everyone. Our old company had been bought by a Canadian company (which promptly moved our operations up there) so a small group of us bought part of the company back. Suddenly we went from a group of 115 to a group of about ten. And we didn’t need or could afford our beautiful office building in our lovely corporate park, so we leased a space further out of town in a new development where the office area was like a giant studio apartment – no walls at all.

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I have got so many funny stories from our old office! One day I will have to tell the story about the guy who was even worse than I am about turning words around and mispronouncing things, so bad that one person even kept a notebook of his sayings! Okay…I will go ahead and tell one – this one is my favorite.

This guy worked in our warehouse and for whatever reason came to my office and we started talking about his interest in the ocean and ocean life.

He told me how he really liked “those shows that used to be on PBS where the French guy would dive into the water and swim around with the fish and the sharks. He was a scientist. You know, that French guy, what was his name? Oh yeah:

Jock CRISCO.”

Not Jacques Cousteau, but Jock Crisco!! And not even really “Crisco” but the emphasis was on the second syllable, to make it even funnier! It was more like…you know…that French guy…Jock CrisCO.

Oh I could have just passed out from holding in my giggles!

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Well, anyway, at the new company that was formed, every single one of us got a cubicle since there was no time and really no money to transform the area into offices. Well, when you are used to a *real* office with a *real* door and *real* windows and *real* office furniture, cubicle living takes a little getting used to. Now that I’ve seen the pics from that article, I wish we could have maybe gotten everybody in on a little fun like decorating our cubes for the holidays. Our company is still around (I left a while back so Av and I could start our family) albeit smaller, but we had so many really smart, creative people there, I know that some of the ideas would have been terrific.

I did a search just now on Flickr and found some other people who decorated their cubes:
Wrapping paper cube
Stockings hung by the fireplace with care
Gingerbread cube
The Elf cube
Even one with an inflatable!

Well, as if going to the White House Christmas Ball isn’t wonderful enough, when you go you get to see some *amazing* gingerbread creations that the pastry chefs have put together!

Mary Sessions, whose husband Jeff is one of our Senators, sent me some pics from this year’s Ball (they are just the nicest family – I love their daughter Mary Abigail!). Each year, they attend. Here are some pics she took from previous years:

2005 (see at the bottom right of this pic? Those are the Bush family dogs!):

2006 (Santa’s sleigh on the roof!):

This year the pastry chefs really outdid themselves, and all the gingerbread is covered in white chocolate. Wow!:

I didn’t realize this, but the menus of different functions at the White House are on the WH website – this is what was served at Thanksgiving. The First Lady even has her favorite recipes there too.

Mary asked Kelly Beville Ogburn to make our our state ornament this year for one of the WH Christmas trees. The other ornaments that were picked out by our state’s Representatives have links to them at the bottom of that page too. The one from the 3rd district is *so* pretty!

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When I looked just now at gingerbread houses on Flickr, there are pics of all kinds of wonderful (and funny) gingerbread creations – gingerbread holiday setting, gingerbread shops, Wizard of Oz scene, Spongebob’s house, even a kitty box (!?what?!) and three different redneck gingerbread scenes (1, 2, 3) even!! My friend Sandy is promising to post her pics of gingerbread from the Grove Park Inn in Asheville soon. Can’t wait to see those!! She’s got pics here of when she’s been to the National Gingerbread House Competition up there before.

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Oh, and you know I can’t even mention about gingerbread without thinking of Bette Mott’s house in McComb. A set of pics from my visits to her house is here.

She loves her gingerbread!

Yesterday I went to Starbucks to see if they had any cute Chanukah-themed things for sale (really this year it was just a mug and a travel cup) *but* they had the most wonderful wreaths inside, made to look like they were composed of balls of yarn:

Love that! Well, the wreaths aren’t for sale, but I figured they would be really easy to make….I went straight to the craft shop for supplies…

Supplies:
Styrofoam balls of two different sizes – I used 12 large and about 10 small
Ornaments if you want to use those too
Yarn in different colors (mine is for Chanukah so I used dark blue, silver, and white)
Glue – I used Sobo
Hot Glue
Floral pins (these helped but I don’t think they’re 100% necessary)

Directions:
Making the large and small balls is done the same way – put some glue on the ball, start yarn running through the glue to make a good start. Wrap-wrap-wrap-wrap in all different directions so it really does look like a yarn ball. Finish the ball by putting more glue on the yarn and wrapping the strand into it several times to make a good closure. Sobo glue dries clear so you don’t have to worry about it showing:

I didn’t want the wreath to be a certain number of any certain colors:

You can do the big spheres and the small spheres at the same time. First, arrange the big ones into a circle:

Used floral pins – one leg of the pin bent to go into a ball on the left-hand side, the other leg into the neighboring ball. I did this so I’d be sure to get a good circle shape. This step really may not be necessary, but I think it helped me.

Once I had all the large styrofoam balls made into a circle shape, I hot glued them all together. Here you can see the hot glue joint and also the floral pin peeking out:

Here it is, drying:

I used smaller yarn balls to cover those floral pins.

…hot-glued those on in varying places, and since I made this for Chanukah, I hung a silver dreidel with clear string from the bottom of the wreath hanger so it looks like it’s actually hanging from the wreath (but the dreidel is pretty heavy and I didn’t want to put a lot of stress on the wreath). Here it is!:

If you make this for Christmas, besides the color change, you could hot-glue on some different ornaments to make it more like the Starbucks wreath.

I can just see this made for a girl’s room, made with pink and green yarns, or if you celebrate Easter, in pastel colors.

What do you think!?

Last night, we had *the* best chicken pot pie. I decided I would start it by making a roux so it would be nice and full/thick (not runny). Ooooh it was wonderful!

Ingredients:
2/3 cup oil (I use olive oil)
2/3 cup flour
1/2 yellow onion, chopped into larger pieces
2 carrots, cut into small thin ribbon pieces (with vegetable peeler)
((plus any other vegetables you’d like to add, like English peas, etc.))
2 cloves garlic, chopped very-very fine
2 tbsp. dried sage (or you could use thyme instead)
salt and pepper
1 roasted chicken, pulled into bite-size pieces (I used a plain already-roasted chicken from Whole Foods. Discard the skin and remove any fat from the meat. It is easiest to pull the meat off when it is still warm, so if you get a roasted chicken from the grocery store, you can do this right when you get back home. Put the pulled meat in a bowl, and it will be ready for later.)
1 cup chicken stock
2 deep-dish pie crusts

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 425*.

Use a large high-sided skillet, or a pan, for this.

First you make a roux. Over medium heat, bring the oil up to temperature, then stir in the four. This will need to be stirred constantly for several minutes until until you have a blonde (very light tan) roux. Add the vegetables – onion, carrot, garlic, etc and cook through:

Add the chicken and cook until hot, then add stock, sage or thyme, and salt and pepper to your liking. Stir, stir, stir. If it’s too thick you can add more stock but 1 cup was perfect this time:

Pour everything into a pie crust (I cheated and used one from the store), then place the other crust on top, making a few slits in the top for steam to escape…

…in the oven for 20-25 minutes – just until the top is a nice golden brown (because everything inside is already cooked through, you’re really just cooking the dough through at this point):

…it was *so* good!!

Baltimore Magazine has an article out right now about artful Christmas decorations there by sculptor Jim Pollock – wow…:

 

“We as a city need more art,” Pollock says. “We need to see art on a daily basis. It’s a softening of the streets…. If people would take a chance and put art in their front yards and not worry about some critic’s criteria, we’d live in a much more interesting place. We’re taught that we have to please our boss, please our mate, but if people would go outside conformity and say, ‘I don’t care what anybody says; this is who I am,’ that’s a powerful gift to give yourself and your community.”

“There are critics,” Pollock acknowledges. …it’s not other people’s opinions that matter; it’s your own opinion that matters. It’s not critics who build cities and nations. Artists do. And we can all be artists if we want.”

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…a metallic Santa crab—with gold-painted wrenches for appendages—sitting atop a giant sleigh, which appeared to be pulled by eight smaller crabs.

(well, it is Baltimore!)

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Last year, Pollock’s own display included a bare Christmas tree frame from which dangled 10 more of his small golden crabs, two Natty Boh beer can angels, four Old Bay Seasoning boxes, and a handful of colored lights.

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…the Hubcap Christmas Tree. A crowd favorite, it’s a towering, eight-foot assemblage of battered hubcaps wired together in a pine-tree shape and decorated with flashing colored lights. It’s topped off with a yellow, plastic stegosaurus where you’d expect a golden star.

“The second year I had the Hubcap Tree up, these people came and said, ‘We come every year to have our picture taken in front of the Hubcap Tree,'” Pollock recalls. “I said, ‘But it’s only been up two years.’ That shows how hungry people are for traditions, especially secular, non-denominational traditions. It’s hard to unite a country that’s multi-cultural, but if we celebrated each other’s traditions instead of fighting over them, we’d be partying all the time.”