Wrapping presents. My least favorite thing about Christmas.

Opening presents. My most favorite thing about Christmas.

I gave up on wrapping paper two years ago. I always have not enough or the wrong kind and I have to store it somewhere, etc. I went to an office supply store and bought a huge roll of white paper for about $16.00 and that is what I use. For every present wrapping opportunity. New this year, I happened to be in Goodwill when they had a big bag of ribbon, so everyone got different kinds of ribbon. After an hour and a half of wrapping, this was the result.Here is the tree Christmas morning.
And we are all posing with a present we got. Mom has lovely pot holders, Aunt Pat has a small pot to melt butter and a compost bin, Chris has a copy of the People's History of the United States, Aunt Carol has a knife sharpener and I have a new cast iron skillet. It was a good Christmas.

A Christmas Miracle

Portland isn't known for snowfall, and in fact there was less than a one percent chance of snow on Christmas, but down it came!

Matt and his cacti

Matt confided to a coworker that he was a ninja, and ever since she doesn't believe anything he says. (The Tualitan Valley Ninja Academy is OK with her telling everyone, because they said it's a good lesson in hiding in plain sight.) Anyway, he also told her that he owned cacti, and she didn't believe him. So here is Matt with his surviving cacti...
(Since 2 out of 7 cacti, plants which require only monthly upkeep, have died, is it really a good idea for him to have children?)

More Christmas Decorations

My Aunt's house was formally my grandparent's house which was formally the entire Stenaros family's house (George, Helen, Pat, Mary Carol). It is the home where we celebrate major holidays, but most especially, Christmas.

Last Saturday was the annual tree trimming day which I missed last year, due to an ill-fated trip to the Oregon Coast. It was too bad, because last year the tree trimming was fraught with problems including the tree falling over a few times leading to the MAunts collapsed on the floor with laughter.

This year was much less entertaining (sigh) but lovely.

My Aunts cut the tree every year right in their neighborhood. Around the corner and down the street there is a man who has probably an acre or so of property on which he plants Christmas Trees. I went there once when I was unemployed and available in the middle of the week. It's pretty cool. It's so close to my Aunt's house, they could carry the tree home if they were the hearty pioneer souls that Matt and I are, but they drive.

When I arrived the tree was in the stand, wired to the window and the lights were up. I put the angel on the top of the tree first. After I took this picture, I climbed the step stool and there was a good 10 minutes of, "Is it straight now?" "No more to the left." "How about now?" "It's leaning too far forward." This ended when Mom got the clippers and I did some actual trimming of the tree. Then she stood up straight.

My grandmother was a "donater"--she didn't like a lot of stuff to hang around, so things went to the Goodwill a lot, or to other relatives. My grandfather was a pack rat. When they were alive, my Grandmother held sway over the upstairs and my Grandfather, the basement. Which is what makes the basement such a fun place to visit. My Aunt, however takes after my Grandfather and the upstairs has become much less spartan over the years. Needless to say, we have a lot of ornaments. A lot. There are ornaments from every decade since the 1950's, many still with their now-antique boxes.

This was Squeak's first Christmas. He was very into the tree. It's a good thing he lives over at my tree-less Aunt Carol's house.
The decorations are also many and varied. On top of the piano we have the nativity scene that was my grandmothers, cool angel candles from the 50's, angel candles from a more recent era, and a swoop of garland with music notes on it. There's also an overlord angel in back there.
I had to choose only one Christmas decoration to save from flood or fire, I would save this Christmas Village. The church is a music box that plays, I think, Silent Night.

This poor angel did something very bad, she is in prison.

After many, many ornaments are placed on the tree and I am drooping from exhaustion, then come the snowflakes. There are roughly one million snow flakes and they all must be put up. I groan about the snowflakes every year. It's a Christmas tradition.
The tree looks lovely when it is finished.

Merry Christmas!

Exciting news! New cleaning tool!

I know you've been waiting to hear about this!

When I moved into my studio apartment, I didn't have a vacuum cleaner and so my Aunt Pat gave me the one in the basement. "The basement" at her house is a treasure trove of all sorts of things that one could want which makes it a fun place to visit. Just the other day I found a box of very cool souvenir plates my Aunt had collected in her travels. I arranged to borrow them after I build the floating shelves. They are super cool.

Anyway, when I first got it, the little vacuum cleaner was a bit worse for wear. After two months of feeling like I was going to cause a fire every time I plugged it in, I had the cord replaced. On the bus ride to the repair shop two people asked me if the vacuum cleaner was a hair dryer and the repair shop guy's eyes just lit up to see it. When I picked it up, a different repair guy, with great nostalgia said, "thanks for bringing this in. It really brought me back." This vacuum cleaner is, to put it mildly, old.

I, easily swayed by nostalgia, was a big fan my vacuum cleaner, but Matt, more swayed by actual working capacity of a vacuum cleaner, didn't really like it. It did have it's quirks. Before my mom replaced the hose, we had to vacuum with gloves on, to keep the decaying old-school rubber off our hands. And the person vacuuming had to stop every half a room or so to tighten the screw on the bottom plate so it wouldn't scratch the floor. The sucking capacity of the vacuum cleaner wasn't so great either. It couldn't really do rugs that well. So we bought a "new to us" one.

This picture doesn't capture the lovely 50's blue that is the old vacuum cleaner, but I love the ecstatic expression of the women on the vacuum cleaner bag wrapper. I also love her swinging sunken couch.
We bought our new vacuum cleaner at Oraks Vacuums (821 N. Lombard). It is a totally refurbished bagless model which only cost $59.00. It works wonderfully on the floors and has the attachments built in. I liked buying a refurbished model because not only was I getting a deal, but I was supporting a local business too.
Perhaps now Matt will look forward to our Tuesday night house cleaning sessions.

More Christmas Decorations

I stayed home from work on Monday to get more Christmas stuff done. One of the things I finished was putting up all the rest of the Christmas decorations.

I like saying "all the rest of the Christmas decorations" when in reality, I don't really have that many and the ones I have take about 40 minutes to put up.

First up:
My mom came up with this idea of an ornament display when we lived in the apartment which wasn't really big enough for a tree, but had a nice big window. She, and the rest of the family members, been buying me (and my brother) an ornament every year. The idea was that when I went out on my own, I would have enough ornaments for a full tree. It worked. Although I still celebrate Christmas with my family, I do have enough ornaments for a tree of my own.

I actually like displaying them this way better, as they are all much more visible than they would be on a tree. They range from somewhat fancy to homemade and I can tell you stories about a lot of them. Though you can ask me to stop when you get bored.
The above two are a representative sample. The one on the left is perhaps my favorite ornament because my grandmother made it for me for Christmas 1975. She was very crafty and packaged it for safekeeping in a See's Candy container. I like the container almost as much as the ornament because it says "Patty's X-Mas Ornament 1975" in her handwriting. Samples of her handwriting are slowly disappearing and it is nice to see it each December.

The one on the right came from one of the Aunts from one of their many trips to Hawaii. I like it because they took a nice seashell and made it fairly kitschy with the dried flowers. It's dorkily hip.
I love kid-crafted ornaments and my mother and I used to have an amusing silent battle each Christmas. I would put the ugly kid ornaments my brother and I made in prominent places on the front of the tree and she would move them to the back. The pine cone is my favorite, because it looks like a preschool concoction. There is a very sad piece of ribbon strangling the cone that makes me laugh.

The one to the right of it is one of the many play-doh ornaments in the collection. Many of them saw their sized reduced over the years because I always liked to taste of homemade play-doh and took bites out of them through the years. There is a holly leaf that is about one quarter of its original size.

The yarn thing to the left of the pine cone also causes giggling. You can't see them, but it has two eyes attached to what was supposed to be the hair section and they are very crazy looking. Someday the pink yarn alien will come alive and--I don't know, begin converting the other ornaments to his alien religion?

What I learned from the above paragraphs. "ornament" does not have an "i" after the "n." Though I typed it that way every single time and had to go back to fix it.
On the left, our holiday swag, which I bought at the Alliance Greens Sale (the Alliance is the old ladies in my church's organization) because "swag" is more fun to say than "wreath." On the right, we have a metal door which allows us to attach all sorts of things to it with magnets. One year at the apartment I made a whole fireplace out of construction paper and hung the stockings on the "mantle." I wasn't in the mood for that this year, so stockings were just hung by the door.
This tree I bought for 50% off at Fred Meyer during the January storm of 2004. I was trapped in my apartment for four days and on day three, I had to go to the store. I walked there, which was my first bit of exercise in days. It felt great. I remember agonizing whether to buy this tree because I was in graduate school at the time and money was very tight. It was $5.00. I'm glad I did, because it all fits in a nice, compact carrier and it is fun to get out and put it away. The ornaments didn't come with any way to hang them on the tree, so I used paper clips.

Amanda's 33 1/3 party

Our friends Mark and Amanda had a 33 1/3 birthday party for Amanda. The theme: albums. Everyone came as an album cover. I knew what cover I would be from the moment I head about the party. Matt picked his costume the night of. It was an incredibly fun party with some good costumes and Matt took a lot of pictures. Sadly, we didn't get every person's picture. But here are some highlights.

Matt's outer costume: 1/2 of the Comfort Eagle Album.

And his inner costume: Nelly. I did the tattoo in eyeliner.
Born to Run is one of my favorite albums of all time and I happen to own a saxophone, so I knew immediately I would be Clarence Clemons (he's actually on the back of the cover just over the fold.) I couldn't find the hat, but I borrowed one at the party.
When I got to the party it turned out that Mark, one of the hosts, had come as Bruce Springsteen from that same album. We took pictures AND won the costume contest. I've never won a costume contest before! My Kiss Clock (made from, what else? an album) will have a prominent place in my house.

This is the inset photo on the album, and a nice picture of Mark.

Amanda, she of the 33 1/3 birthday, channeled Patti Smith.


This was Matt's favorite costume--also the album cover he was threatening to come as all week. "She worked with what she had." was his comment.

Best "get to dress like normal, mostly" costume.
Here are Dolly Parton and Jimmy Buffett

Hafidha came as the room on the cover of The Stranger.

Devo's iconic hat.

Everyone oooohed over this cover. And the parasol.


Have a lot of white? Come as the White Album.

This was my favorite labor intensive costume. How did he get the lines so straight?
Pink Floyd has some very iconic images as was evidenced at this party. Five people came as something Pink Floyd-esqe.


I voted for this costume, also very get-to-look-normal-while-channeling-the-album.

Three people came as Dark side of the moon. We only have two pictures, though.



I loved the way these people entirely channeled their album covers.

There were a few literal interpretations. On the left, Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy. On the right, Poison's Look What the Cat Dragged In.

Sabrina wins the prize for heaviest prop.

Amanda did a lot of prep. There were prizes for the best costumes. She made bowls out of albums. There were also a million album ornaments to take home as party favors.

If you need to have your own record album bowl, Amanda says to turn the oven on to 200 degrees, then put the album over another bowl and it will turn all flimsy and bowl shaped. You can also mold them into different shapes.