Category Archives: Festivities

Warning: Very Frivolous Post

Posted on by
It’s December!  The sun is shining!  The snow is slushy!  My husband’s office Christmas party is only tomorrow!
I know the socially acceptable norm is to hate the office Christmas party, especially the HUSBAND’S office Christmas party, but I…don’t.  Frankly, I love it.  I look forward to it every year.  I love dressing up, and eating food that I didn’t make, and drinking lots of wine…and I realize that those are things I could do NOT at a Christmas party, but I love the festivity of it all.  My love for office Christmas parties is so great that I am thinking of a new career: hiring myself out to attend Christmas parties for those women who do not want to go.  It will be like being a Christmas party escort, but in a totally non-skanky way.  In fact, I offered to wife swap for my friend Nan when she wrote about not wanting to go to her husband’s party.  (I think it may have weirded her out.  But Nan!  There’s going to be karaoke!  KARAOKE!  I only wish there was karaoke at my husband’s party.) 
It’s probably fortunate that there is not karaoke, given that my zest for singing far, far exceeds my actual talent.  Related: Mark’s recent report card was very good in every area except music.  “Mark is an enthusiastic student, but requires support when using his singing voice.” 
You know how there are people who are Shoe People, or Handbag People, those who have many of those items and enjoy shopping for them, who change their shoes and/or handbags to go with every outfit?  I am not one of those people.  (I am more of a Coat and Sweater Person).  So I was looking at my outfit for the party: the dress that I bought for last year’s party that I did not end up attending, boots dating from 1999, and my “handbag”.  My “handbag” is actually a well worn, large messenger bag from Roots that is constantly stuffed full with everything from travel Kleenex and hand sanitizer to gloves and five different lip products.  Currently there is also a book of stamps and several grocery lists jammed in there alongside a bracelet made out of pompoms and jingle bells that one of Mark’s little friends made for me.  In other words, it doesn’t really “go” with a party outfit.  Usually I borrow a handbag from my mother – who is not only a Handbag Person and a Shoe Person, but also just a Clothing Person in general.  Girl likes to shop. – but she is currently out of town.  (Note: she just chastised me for not just going over to her house and rummaging through her things until I found an appropriate bag.  Sorry Mom!  I try not to make it my business to just go through other people’s things.  Especially someone’s closet.  Don’t want to find something I don’t want to find if you know what I mean and I think you do.)
Anyway, I really needed to find a handbag, so I spoke to my very good friend who is, without a shadow of a doubt, a Handbag Person and she gave me tips on where to go to maximize my shopping experience.  I followed her directions, all the while breathing deep ujjayi breaths to alleviate my anxiety.  And look what I found!

Cute, right?  A little handbag, all my own!  Not only do I think it is cute, it was on half-price!  Did I mention I love my Handbag Friend?  And boots to replace the ones from 1999!  They are, I think, just the right mix of cute and slutty.  I’m all ready for the party! 

Naughty? Or nice?

Posted on by
Did you know it is 41 days until Christmas?  That’s less than six weeks!  Squee!
I am feeling extraordinarily festive today.  We put up the exterior decorations – and by “we” I mean “my husband” – and I have been bustling around figuring out how many family pictures to print for the Christmas cards and what pictures to put in the calendars we send the grandparents, and when to start baking things.  The latter feels a bit strange, since we still have overflowing bags of Halloween candy, but whatever.  Things are festive around here.
As an aside, I know there is a practice of parents purchasing Halloween candy from their children, presumably to keep them from eating sugary treats.  What then happens to the Halloween candy?  Do the parents consume it themselves?  Does it get donated somewhere?  Or thrown out?  And if it gets thrown out, why go Trick or Treating anyway? 
Does anyone still send out holiday cards?  I love addressing cards and adding pictures and a holiday newsletter; it is never a chore to me.  However, I was looking at last year’s holiday newsletter, and I realized that, other than the kids’ ages and grades, there is nothing new to put in this year’s letter.  Would it be funny to send out the exact same letter with the pertinent information crossed out and rewritten?  Probably not. 
Part of the reason I feel so festive is that, other than three small items which I can pick up this week, I have completed my Christmas shopping.  This is a huge deal to me.  I always try to finish by mid-November because the mere thought of going to the mall and being faced with people who are ready to THROW DOWN over a parking space and who may just kill someone over the last Zhu Zhu Pet and the mile-long of lineup of sobbing, hysterical children dressed to the nines just to sit on the creepy mall Santa’s lap gives me heart palpitations.  Nicole’s number one holiday hint: to keep the Christmas spirit, avoid the mall at all costs. 
And remember: there is room for everyone on the Nice List!

Whew! It’s November!

Posted on by
Did you survive Halloween?  Honestly, I wasn’t 100% sure we were going to make it through the day yesterday.  The kids were completely wired with Trick or Treating on the horizon.  At one point they were running laps around the house – which is not an uncommon occurrence, really – and I thought they were literally going to bounce off the walls.  Fortunately it was warm enough for them to be sent outside to play.  At one point I saw them setting up the small, empty plastic swimming pool at the bottom of the deck steps and taking turns jumping into it.  Just when I thought someone was going to break something, they switched activities and decided to take shovelfuls of dirt from one garden and run it across the yard to another garden.  Ah, childhood.  To have that kind of energy for such busywork.
Finally it was time for Trick or Treating:
We carved all four of those pumpkins yesterday afternoon.  Nothing like leaving the carving of FOUR PUMPKINS to the very last minute.
As usual there were very few Trick or Treaters on our street, and that combined with the fact that our surrounding neighbours dote on the boys and get many large treats specifically for them resulted in the boys obtaining obscene amounts of candy.  My general policy on Halloween treats is to let the kids have as much as they want for the first few days, and then the novelty wears off and they lose interest in it.  My other policy is to help myself to the giant buckets of candy popcorn that one neighbour always gets for them.  Nom nom. 
Friday night the kids’ school held a Halloween Family Dance, organized by one of my very good friends – the one of the famed cake-making skills – and it was, in her words, EPIC.  It was very fun although I did feel somewhat surreal when the DJ played I LikeTo Move It.  I felt like I was transported back to 1994 and that I should have been drinking cheap vodka slimes out of a jug and wearing a way sluttier outfit whilst dancing with some guy dressed up as Elwood Blues or similar.  As it was I went as a witch:

Scary! 
What was your favourite costume as a child?  I remember dressing up, strangely enough, as Miss Canada when I was about seven or eight.  I just loved that, even more than my gypsy costume at age six.  Do kids still dress up as gypsies?  It doesn’t seem so politically correct.  Remember when everyone used to dress up as hobos?  That strikes me as strange now, children dressing up as homeless people down on their luck.  I also remember – albeit hazily – dressing as a rag doll in my very early twenties.  Ah, there’s nothing like the sight of a grown woman in a rag doll outfit, tearing up the dance floor and doing tequila shots, now is there?  CLASSY. 
So tell me, how was your Halloween?  Did you dress up?  Did you Trick or Treat?  Or are you a Halloween Grinch, one who turns out all the lights and closes the drapes?  I love Halloween, but I can tell you, I’m happy it only comes once a year and that we have another year before the next one.  Maybe that’s just my candy popcorn hangover speaking.

And…we’re back.

Posted on by
Wow, was I just on vacation?  I have that weird, not-unfamiliar feeling that I was in a completely alternate universe many months ago, although we’ve been home for only a few days.  It’s funny how one day a person can spend hours in a complete state of relaxation, eating sublime food, walking on a beach, and reading the O list and recommendations on how to “live your best life”, and then the next day finds that same person in a state of agitation, baking and frosting eight dozen sugar cookies in varying spooky shapes, with a shirt covered in flour and a harried expression.  And getting extremely irritable should anyone attempt to sample one of the cookies that is not in the designated sampling container.
The weather has taken a definite turn for the wintry: snow on the ground yesterday, flakes in the air today, grey sky and cold, cold wind.  My current fervent hope is that it will warm up for Halloween.  Not that I am the parent on Trick or Treat duty – in fact my children have requested that I stay home to hand out candy to our (presumably, if history is any indication) few Trick or Treaters.  But milder weather would be much appreciated prior to Sunday. 
A few days ago I was relaxing in a beautiful place next to the Pacific Ocean, and right now my kids are sneaking up on me wearing vampire teeth screaming “BOO!  I’m a vampire!  Did I scare you?”, and putting together puzzles between such fearsome episodes, the television is on, and I just saw the following headline: Charlie Sheen found naked, incoherent with escort in NYC hotel room.  Surreal.  Also surreal is the fact that I don’t see that headline every single day.  I mean, is that really news?
To add to it, yesterday I heard the song Love is a Battlefield at 5:15 am and it stayed with me all day.  All day I was bursting out with “We are young!  Heartache to heartache we stand!”  ALL DAY.  That tune also followed me into the night, when I woke up in a cold sweat at three in the morning after a nightmare which involved – of all things – running out of draw tickets for the upcoming Scholastic Book Fair.  Which just goes to show, not for the first time, that I am kind of lame.
************************************************
On a serious note: someone I know is currently going through a terrible time with her very young daughter, who has a frightening, rare, and very difficult to treat illness.  This family is going through hell; I cannot even begin to imagine.  Please, if you are the praying type, send out some prayers and thoughts for them.  And if you’re reading this, know that people care about you.

I guess they were deprived, after all.

Posted on by
One of the things I love about having my own little family is the ability to make traditions.  It’s like when one becomes a parent, one has the magical power to carry on family traditions, or not, so when we had to cancel our Thanksgiving trip this weekend due to illness – which was fortunately short-lived – I thought, opportunity knocks.
In direct contrast to seemingly everyone else on this continent, a turkey dinner, to me, is not an amazing and exciting feast, one to be anticipated and to impel the wearing of elastic waisted pants.  A turkey dinner, to me, is a dinner in which I eat dinner rolls and vegetables.  Even in the days in which I did eat meat, I never enjoyed turkey, and the sight of a turkey, cooked or raw, could turn my stomach.  It’s just so…graphic.  I do not particularly enjoy mashed potatoes or cranberry sauce, stuffing is repellent to me, and I do not like pie, any kind of pie, but especially pumpkin.  So while I understand that the vast majority of the population looks forward to a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, I most certainly do not.
So when we opted to stay home for Thanksgiving, I put together a Sunday dinner that consisted of the following: freshly baked European peasant bread, salad with goat cheese, dried cranberries, pine nuts, and balsamic oil and vinegar, and butternut squash bisque.  I also prepared pork chops for the guys.  The dinner was delicious, I thought, and happily festive, what with the squash and the cranberries.  My husband even went so far as to say that the soup was the greatest soup he had ever had, although I took that with a small grain of salt as he had just finished golfing, strangely, 24 holes, and was ravenously hungry.
Despite that, my husband really missed his turkey dinner.  We discussed traditions, and he is of the camp that the boys should be able to have a turkey dinner for certain holidays, Thanksgiving being one of them, even if we do not go to someone else’s house for it, as we would have this weekend.  So, yesterday we went out for dinner, and he ordered the Thanksgiving special.
It’s hard sometimes to merge family traditions when you get married, but it’s especially hard to just ignore family traditions.  As far as I’m concerned, I could never be involved in another turkey dinner for the rest of my natural life, and I would be happy.  My husband and the boys feel differently.
Our conclusion?  My husband can make his own turkey dinner.  I’ll make the soup. 

Maybe for our next Thanksgiving dinner, we can have duck!  Just kidding.  Ew.

No matter what, you probably did not consume sour milk.

Posted on by
It’s been a strange week.  If you were to run an ultraviolet light over our house, doubtless there would be an offensive amount of germs and viruses squirming on the surfaces.  I myself came down with a weird 24 hour virus characterized by a high fever and narcolepsy.  After sleeping a lot I felt better.  Then Jake was up in the night vomiting.  There’s nothing quite like the night time vomit.  It puts you on edge the whole night, just waiting for the next episode.  The slightest cough or movement jolts you out of bed.  Then there’s the cleanup.  You strip the bed, you change the pajamas, you wipe down the bathroom, but since it’s the middle of the night and you are a zombie, and also you are comforting a very upset vomiting person, you tend to miss a lot of things that come to view in the harsh morning light.  Ew.  So I have been spending the day in an exhausted cleaning haze, except when I actually lay down on the bed I was remaking and fell asleep.  I woke up with Mark holding a Lego masterpiece right up to my face, talking about it in great deal.  I think he actually thought I was awake the whole time and was too amazed by his Lego skills to answer.
It was a pretty good Lego sculpture, after all.
Because of the vomiting, we decided to cancel our Thanksgiving trip which makes me a bit sad – I was looking forward to fresh grapes and apples – but also a bit relieved because frankly, I am just too tired to spend eighteen hours in the car this weekend.  I’m also a little confused, because I have no idea what to do for Thanksgiving dinner.  I mean, I’m not about to make a turkey or a pie.  But will the kids feel deprived?  Will my husband be deprived?  Should we just go out for dinner?  The pressure is on.  I did buy a butternut squash yesterday.  Maybe I could festively make some soup?
As I write this, Jake asked if we COULD have turkey, even if we are not going to Grandma’s for dinner.  Maybe, he said, we could go catch one.  Mark then joined the conversation by asking if turkeys available at grocery stores are already dead, or do you have to kill them yourselves?  I’m guessing soup might be a disappointment for them.
Further in the chronicles of Things I Would Rather Not Have Happened this week, I attempted, at my husband’s urging, to Keep Up My Strength by eating while sick.  One morning I poured skim milk on my cereal and started eating.  It tasted terrible.  “Everything tastes terrible when you’re sick” my husband admonished, “You just have to eat it and Keep Up Your Strength.”  So I did.  I felt kind of gross, and later I was mixing muffin batter and opened the skim milk.  Although the best before date was days away, it was completely sour.  I consumed sour milk for breakfast while sick. 
It’s been quite the week, but it’s Friday, it’s the long weekend, and with any luck we are all on the mend.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  I am thankful to have you all in my life.

Too Much Stuff! Or, why you should consider a charity birthday party.

Posted on by

A little while ago, my best friend mentioned that her daughter had attended a “charity” birthday party, in which the birthday child had requested donations to a charity in lieu of gifts. This struck me as brilliant. I’ve always wanted to have a big birthday party with lots of guests, but I didn’t want to get the corresponding number of gifts, both from a think-of-the-earth-and-all-those-plastic-toys point of view and also a my-kid-already-has-too-much-stuff-the-spoiled-bastard point of view.

Then a very good friend of mine told me her daughters have birthday parties in which guests bring food bank donations in lieu of gifts and I was completely inspired. (Note: I am also completely inspired by her phenomenal cake-making skills, although my arrangement of miniature plastic animals on green frosting and calling it an African savannah is was somewhat less impressive than her cake that looked exactly like a bag of movie popcorn, or the one that looked like a swimming pool, or the perfect cake-replica of Elmo.)


Seriously, she MADE these. Kind of makes my efforts look a little, um, weak?
Anyway, for Jake’s birthday, we requested guests bring food bank donations, which they did most generously. The key to a successful charity birthday party is to get agreement from your child beforehand, unless you want a resentful little birthday kid. From a young age we have instilled in the boys the idea that they are very lucky, and that there are some children who are not so lucky, and some of those children do not even have enough to eat. Telling Jake that his party would help some of those hungry children was a real selling point for him. We also assured him that he would be receiving gifts – from us, his grandparents, aunts and uncles – just not from his friends. Then we made sure to give him a few things that he really wished for – a certain Bakugan, a Ben 10 Alien, the book The Great Pie Robbery, the latter of which sent my mother on a wild goose chase to a number of book stores. He didn’t miss the gifts at all, and was excited just to have cards that were thoughtfully chosen or made.

There are so many good reasons to have a charity birthday party. Obviously, the charity benefits, but so does the child. In our society, children often have so much that they really can’t appreciate all they have – my children included. From a more selfish point of view, it is MUCH easier on the parents. How many times have you trolled the toy store aisles, wondering what an appropriate gift would be, wondering which book/Barbie/Polly Pocket/superhero/ Star Wars figurine the birthday kid does not already have, only to find out later that the birthday kid already received that exact gift but you forgot to attach a gift receipt so they can’t exchange it? Or maybe that’s just me. Buying some extra groceries is just so much easier. No gift wrap, no waste – it’s perfect.

Look at all the donations! Thank you to Jake’s friends for their wonderful generosity.