Merry Christmas!

Just wanted to wish everyone a very merry Christmas and all the best for a happy, healthy and joyful new year.

My daughter is the only girl in our family. She is also the only grand-daughter on both my and my husband's side of the family. There are boys everywhere and in most cases, she handles it very well.

This week my sister took three of my boys for a sleep over with her two boys. My little girl was left out. Not on purpose, of course, but left out nonetheless. In chatting with my mom about it, she offered to have her for a sleep over, go shopping and do some fun stuff. It was a very good plan.

Since she is my mom's only grand-daughter, my mom decided it was high time she start spoiling this little girl. Keep in mind that my daughter is not a real "gift person" ~ which really goes against all the women on my side of the family. Gifts don't mean a lot to her ~ she values quality time over stuff.

So last night my mom decided to take her out to the mall and buy her something just for her ~ something girly so that the boys wouldn't be jealous. My mom had in mind a piece of jewelry...perhaps a bracelet or something. They traveled all over the mall looking for the perfect piece. It wasn't there.

They went back to my mom's to think about it. This morning they were going to go out and make a purchase. Kylie was feeling bad about her Granny spending money on her. She kept saying, "Don't spend your money on me, Granny. You still have to buy the turkey for Christmas!" My mom assured her that she had money enough for the turkey and a gift for Kylie.

When Kylie got up this morning my mom asked her how she felt about the jewelry ~ had she decided yet?
Kylie's response: "Can we go to TSC?"
For those of you who don't know, TSC stands for Tractor Supply Company. There is no jewelry in this store. There are tractors, bird seed, work gloves etc.
My mom figured she couldn't fight the genes in my little girl, so she agreed to go......instead of a cute little bracelet, can you guess what my sweet girl chose as her gift from her Granny?

It has no silver and no gold. No sparkles. No pink. Not even shiny.

She chose...a baseball cap. A blue Toronto Maple Leafs baseball cap. And....a car. A model of a Mustang. And she is very happy.

You know, you just can't fight it. She is who she is. A sweet, kind and loving little girl ~ but man, I have to blame Nate for some of this stuff!

The Nose Knows

I've been thinking a lot about our sense of smell lately. Perhaps an odd thing to be thinking about but it is the path my mind has wandered along a few times recently so it might be time to write about it.

There's a lot of "banning of scents" in the city these days. I just overheard a conversation recently where a lady was complaining because her boss had asked her not to wear scented deoderant anymore because another employee in the cubicle next to her was having a reaction.

I think that's sad. Sad, of course, because she can't wear deoderant. But sad too, because there are people allergic to scent. The sense of smell, to me, is amazing. Truly. I can't think of a stronger element that can disgust you, please you, overwhelm you, or remind you. Specifically, the remind part. I can't believe how quickly I can be transported back in time by a whiff of something I recognize. Par example:

The Scent of My Grandfather: I don't even know the name of his cologne but whenever I smell someone wearing it, I tear up and want to run to the arms of the person wearing it. It must be a fairly common scent because I have smelled it before. I am transported back to one of the bone crushing hugs my Poppa used to give me.

The Scent of My Grandma's Pantry: Just the other day I was taken back to the old pantry off her kitchen when I opened a tin of home-baked chocolate chip cookies I had baked. It had never happened to me quite so strongly before. I was, all of a sudden, sneaking one of her cookies from her blue tin off the shelf in the old farm-house.

The Scent of Guilt: There is a cheap woman's cologne out there called Night Musk. If EVER I smell that crap, I feel awful in the pit of my stomach. When I was 15 I snuck out while my parents were away and met up with a German boy I had met only days before.(And came home at a very unreasonable hour, grounded for a few weeks, hence the guilt.) I doused myself in that evil cologne before I went and it still makes me feel terrible whenever I smell it.

The Scent of Clean: There are three of these:
Vinegar and Water for washing floors. This totally takes me back to my mom's kitchen as she always washed the floor with this mixture.

Sheets off the Clothesline: This is the scent of heaven trapped in cotton.

Ivory Dish soap: This is all I use because, again, I am transported to my grandma's kitchen. It's all she ever used to do her dishes and I love being reminded of her old farm house.

The Scent of my Husband: He has several scents but the one I actually like is the smell of lumber. There is a definite smell to it and many days he comes home smelling of freshly cut wood. It's a good smell.

The Scent of Christmas: This summer we were hiking in Vermont on top of some tall mountain covered in Balsam trees. It was like taking a long wander into Christmas. The smell was incredible and I tried to breathe as deeply as I could to take it all in.

I was thinking about my scent ~ will I leave a legacy of smells? Perhaps you think this is a funny question, but I do think of my grandfather and how I can go back in time to be with him when I smell him. With all the scent banning, I don't wear any particular perfume or body spray. But I want to. I want to leave my friends and family with a lasting memory of me when I'm gone...hopefully later rather than sooner.

There are a host of other smells that bring back feelings...like the smell of brand new baby (yum!) or the smell of formaldehyde (takes me back to grade 10 bio when I dissected a frog and poked it in the eye and something squirted out and hit me in the neck!), the smell of BBQ, and so many more. Will some of these memory-triggering scents be lost as we move into a scent-free world?? I hope not!

Dinner with Friends

On Saturday night we went out for dinner with a bunch of friends. It was a great night ~ loads of laughter and good food. Conversation moved from one topic to another quite quickly but I have to admit that my favourite bit of it was when I mentioned the television painter Bob Ross.

Not sure if you know who Bob Ross is but I was amazed at the light that went on in people's eyes when I mentioned him. It was hilarious. The next twenty minutes at the restaurant was spent chatting about "Happy little trees", "there are no mistakes, just happy accidents" and his list of colours..."We'll start with a little raw sienna and blend in yellow ochre."

If you don't know who he is, then none of this will make any sense to you, but if you've been mesmerized with his half hour show of painting then you're actually in good company.

I'm considering ordering a t-shirt ~ turns out he has a great website. Who knew??

'tis the season

It's starting to feel Christmas-y here. I'm not one for going over-board during the Christmas season but I do like a few decorations, some Christmas music, and of course, food.

By the way, thank you to a few of you who gave me some good ideas for boring-old-lunch. From Fancy Nancy's to quick homemade soups and hard-boiling eggs a dozen at a time, I think things might be improving at noon around here.

Every year I do a bit of baking, again not loads because then I just eat it or throw it out, but there are a few family favourites that need to be made every year. This afternoon I enjoyed a little bit of baking with my mother-in-law, making family recipes from their side. She is an excellent baker and makes the ultimate sugar cookie. I know you're probably thinking, "Did she just say ultimate and sugar cookie together?" But really, until you've tried them you have no idea what a real sugar cookie can taste like. My sister is jealous of my mother-in-law for many reasons (I have a good one and she doesn't) but the main one is the sugar cookies.

I think one of the fun things about baking with old family recipes is the names of the baked goods themselves. Some of my personal favourites are:
-Hello Dollies (many families make these ~ a graham crumb bottom with nuts, chippits, and coconut on top and then a whole can of sweetened condensed milk, baked till golden)
-Bugs (again many families make these ~ peanuts and chow mein noodles covered in chocolate)
-Cream Cheese Buttons (melt in your mouth no-bake cream cheese little things with a hint of mint)

Another new family fave is the big pretzel sticks dipped in milk chocolate and then rolled in Skor bits. Yum!

All this talk of food is making me want to snack ~ so I'd best be signing off and heading to the kitchen. Happy baking ~ and if you have any excellent family recipes, send them my way!

Lunch

It's lunch time right now as I'm typing and I have to admit that I hate lunch time. I hate it only because I never know what to make for lunch. I have a list of about 4 things I make, it seems.
Soup and crackers.
Kraft dinner of some sort.
Bagels and cream cheese.
Veggies, dip, meat, cheese....an array of scraps from the fridge, basically.

So this week I've tried to really kick it up a notch. It's really pathetic. Here's the new fancy version of lunch.
Soup and home-made bread.
Pancakes.
Pillsbury crescent rolls with ham and cheese rolled in them.

Wow. I know. You think I'm just a wild and crazy cook. But you see, that is why I'm writing on this. Please, please, for the sake of my family, send me some new, tasty, creative and EASY ideas for lunch. We're dying here....