By 6:30am I was showered, dressed in nice clothes, perfume, jewelry, all ready for CHRISTMAS!
But it appears our Ontario guests are NEVER GOING TO WAKE UP!
COME ON ladies!! It is CHRISTMAS! Santa was here. GET UP! It is already 6:47! Sheesh!
Tag Archives: christmas
Hope for a white Christmas?
I don’t want to jinx it, but it is snowing heavily right now!
Christmas prep work begins
My Mom and sister are taking the train here to visit for Christmas and New Years.
This is exciting and gives me a project. Preparing for their arrival!!
Here is my prep work so far:
Decide on components for Christmas dinner. Check.
Buy Julie extra thick and warm fleece sheets for her bed. Check.
Buy Julie new thick blanket for her bed. Check.
Tease Mom and Julie that we don’t heat our house much and they may freeze. In Progress.
Remind them they have their own baseboard heaters in their guest bedrooms. To do.
Surf the web for creative Christmas-y table centre pieces. Check.
Hope Jeff skips over that last one. In progress.
Plan Griswold-like light show for outside. To be determined.
Buy turkey. For Jeff’s list.
Plan meal plans and sweets and snacks and dips and drinks. Check.
Warn Mom and Julie to bring bigger pants for the way home. Check.
Ignore Julie’s threats of sweet potatoes and cauliflower pizza crusts. Check.
Buy bedside table sweets for guest bedrooms. Check.
Hide bedside sweets so I don’t eat them. Check.
Move grow light set-up to the basement. Check.
Get distracted and plant mixed lettuce greens and cherry tomatoes. Check.
Recover parsley from outside and put parsley pot under grow-light. Check.
Stack wood for the second half of the winter. In progress. And by that I mean, thinking about it is in progress.
Watch 3 hours of the Food Network. Decide I have a secret passion and skill for making chocolates and I should really buy some supplies and molds. Check.
Hope that was a passing thought. Check.
Browse the yard isle at Walmart debating what to knit for Christmas presents. Check.
Kick myself in the ass thinking I’ll actually do that when I haven’t finished a knitting project in almost 20 years. Check.
Decide I shouldn’t go overboard with any sort of Christmas decoration because our guests are coming on Christmas eve and I’ll want to rip it all down the next day. Check.
Warn Mom and Julie to bring slippers and/or Crocs for wearing inside our house because the floor might be cold if we haven’t stoked the fire. Check.
Reflect fondly on the thought that Zeus is still here to hopefully spend another Christmas with us. Check Check Check.
Wonder where to put a walking stick so Mom and Julie and herd Zeus out of their way during their midnight pee. Check.
Wish upon Thanksgiving’s wishbone that we have a fun filled holiday. Check.
Win wishbone pull. Negative.
Wish we still had Cherry coke in Canada. Check.
Oh wait, where was I….
To be continued.
Beautiful day off, like an Indian summer, only in November
We both had today off in lieu of Remembrance Day yesterday.
It was warm today! Double digits! Jeff finished a step for the front door yesterday and today he replaced a couple wall boards on his shed.
I did some of weeding on the rose garden and some weed whacking. I brought the hummingbird feeders in to soak so I can get them cleaned up and put away.
I’ve enjoyed watching a red breasted nuthatch at our feeders this weekend. Just one. I don’t think I’ve seen a nuthatch here at all before, but Jeff swears we’ve had them before, often, so maybe I’m finally old enough to have lost my memory. …..Yes, I just did a blog search and I’ve had them on our list of birds here in 2009 so he is right and I am old.
Jeff has a pork roast in the oven that he covered in a herb rub. Oh my goodness it smells good. I bought a couple bundles of fresh beautiful carrots from our neighbour at the farmer’s market. Can’t wait to have them with the roast.
Other excitement today, Zeus killed a mouse in the basement! What a killer, eh? Good boy.
Christmas
I have been so aggravated by Christmas creeping into our stores before Hallowe’en. It is WAY WAY WAY too early for Santa Clause parades and Christmas tree sales and Christmas carols! WAY TOO EARLY! December 1st is too early for Christmas carols. This is going to make everyone so sick and tired of Christmas by the time it comes.
However, I did start a bit of Christmas shopping. It is a great plan for me to start early so we can get them in the mail to Ontario before it costs us a fortune for guaranteed pre-Christmas deliver. I think I start early every year though and peter out before too long.
Christmas will be very different for us this year, and not so quiet! We haven’t gone home for Christmas since our wedding in 2007 because it is such an awful time of the year for travel, both for the actual travel and because of the pets and heating the house. But this year we will have company!! My mom and sister are heading east on the train to spend the holidays with us! (less presents to mail!)
It will be nice. I’ve coped okay having our quiet Christmases, and sitting in on family Christmases on video chats, but it is a little hard to have our beautiful Christmas dinner over in 10 minutes and Jeff watches football and it is just so strange not having a house full of family.
I have no idea what we’ll do for the rest of the days they are here, but maybe we’ll save some wood to stack or something. Keep them busy 
New Blog Features
Over on the right hand side I’m trying out a “On this day in…” feature that shows posts I’ve made on this date in previous years. Like today for instance, it has been 7 years since sweet little Surf left us.
If you are an email subscriber for the blog, you may have noticed that I’ve been posting some early entries from 1983. I found a school journal from grade 2 and grade 3 and they are so hilarious! My spelling is atrocious. I’m entering them in a few at a time, and preserving the bad spelling. If you want to follow along, they start on Feb 3, 1983
And in other news
It is 5pm and almost completely dark. Ugh. I hate driving home from work in the dark.
Boxing Day 2011
Christmas 2011 was lovely, and technology made it so much easier.
With phones, and FaceTime I was able to be part of my family’s Christmases. It was such a treat to see our niece open her gift from us and to see how excited she was!
The weather was perfect. We got the perfect kind of Christmas snow covering. All the spruce trees were covered in snow, the ground is covered, there were deer tracks (or were they reindeer??) across the front lawn.
Here is our Christmas view:
Awesome Christmas socks my sister gave me. They have rubber monkeys on the bottom for grips!
Jeff prepping our turkey:
My new scarf and hat from my sister:
Monty was so tuckered out after Christmas. He is like a little kid on Christmas morning, so excited! He wants to help open all the gifts and sniff them all over. Yes, he even had his own stocking
Today it is milder and the snow is turning to rain. Jeff just plowed off the driveway so we can get it back down to gravel as it melts. +10 and rain on the way for Wednesday!
Christmas Eve
We’re ready for Christmas!
I love this old fashioned Santa. He’s on our kitchen counter right now, waiting for me to make banana bread.
Monty just had his Christmas Eve bath. Hopefully he’ll be dry by Christmas
Christmas shopping already?
Christmas Eve 2009
Here are some photos from our Christmas Eve here in Nova Scotia.
Monty had to have a Christmas Eve bath. Jeff took him for an adventure in the woods and whatever he rolled in was very stinky… and possibly very dead.
Christmas Holidays are here!
Yesterday was my last day of work until January 4th! WOO HOOO
What has been going on?
-upgraded to Windows 7 today on my desktop computer at home. It went fairly smoothly. I went from 32 bit to 64 bit since my computer was capable of it. I’ve moved most of my files back and now I’m reinstalling software. 1 beef so far – it automatically installs drivers for every device, which is awesome, but I can’t get the mouse to recognize the left thumb button and I am used to using it ALL the time.
-I’m listening to old time holiday songs on Sirius. Looks like there are 5 Christmas stations this year, so I can jump back and forth between Bing Crosby’s Christmas channel, contemporary carols (yuck), holiday classics on the 40′s channel (currently listening to Buddy Clark’s Winter Wonderland), pop carols, or carols from country stars.
-I zipped to town this morning to beat the grocery store rush. It worked! I hate grocery shopping, but it was more tolerable with hardly anyone in the store.
-Christmas shopping is all done! Gifts are mailed. Okay one didn’t go out until this morning so it will be way way way late, but…. aww well I’m not perfect
-the snow is quickly being replaced by mud. It’s been raining for a couple days now. Jeff had to plow Monday morning and I’m so grateful that he did (and I LOVE THAT PLOW) because the driveway would have been all rock hard ice with all the rain. Around my car it is very icy.
-Jeff didn’t take extra days off this Christmas so he still has another day to go tomorrow. My employer forces us to take 5 days of vacation at Christmas.
-I am going to miss everyone like crazy at Christmas. I love our family Christmases so much, but travel at this time of year is awful. (see ‘We ate Leonard’ – http://lisaschuyler.com/index.php/2007/12/we_ate_leonard for a refresher) Hopefully we’ll live closer some year so we can have family Christmases again.
-I’m going to have to reboot in a sec to install more software, so ta ta for now.
Christmas Tree is up!
Today we got our first Christmas tree together today!
We debated the cut-your-own fields, and we scoured two different tree lots, and then we found OUR TREE!
We decided against cutting our own, since there isn’t a speck of snow and everything is muddy after our heavy downpour yesterday (more on that in my next post). Dragging a tree out of a tree farm through the mud didn’t seem all Christmasy.
We settled on Edward Chisholm’s tree yard in the Canadian Tire parking lot. They always have trees moving there so we hoped they would be freshly cut. A lot of Christmas trees are cut here back in early November for export.
Did you know that is one of the biggest crops in Nova Scotia? Christmas Trees! Balsam fir usually. I would never have imagined a balsam fir Christmas tree. Balsam fir in the boreal forests of Ontario are thinly branched and known to be the most flammable of trees.
The balsam firs here are thick and strong and smell INCREDIBLE!
This tree yard also had a few pines. I like a pine Christmas tree, but wanted to try the traditional balsam fir of Nova Scotia first.
I always wondered how they baled the trees. When you see tractor trailers of Christmas trees going by on the highway (often exported to the US), the trees are all wrapped up. Now I know how they do it!
They use this baler. It has a motor that is started underneath with a pull start cord. The tree goes in, butt first, from the far side. The operator starts the baling twine around the base, and then grabs the bottom branches with 2 metal hooks that pull the tree through as the twine is wrapped briskly around the tree. Lickity split, the tree is bundled, and easy to handle.
And here is our tree!!
They say you should saw off the bottom of the tree before you pop it into your tree stand full of water.
Monty thought that piece of wood was meant for him, so he scooped it up as soon as it hit the porch.
We got a heavy duty, last a life time, tree stand manufactured in New Brunswick. It was really easy to use. Underneath I have Grandma Stock’s tree felt that she passed on to me a few years ago.
The tree was a little bit too tall if we wanted to fit our new angel on, and we did, so Jeff took it out to the porch to cut a few more inches off the stem.
And presto!
Jeff surprised me and told me to open my first gift. It it a beautiful Nova Scotia seagull pewter Christmas ornament that says “Our 1st Christmas XO” on it. awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
Here it is decorated!! Most of our Christmas decorations we received as wedding gifts last year. Every one is treasure.
And here is our angel for on top!
It smells really good in here! We put up the rest of decorations. I’ll get another photo of the tree for you once all of our presents are underneath it 