these are a few of my favorite things....

Borrowed from blackbird....

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags?

wrapping paper, most assuredly. generally recycled from whatever we received last year. occasionally cloth bags.

2. Real tree or artificial?
real. so long as i can convince my parents and find one that's not sprayed (my mom is allergic)


3. When do you put up the tree?
well, now that i dont live at home, as soon as i get there and convince the fam that we still need one.


4. When do you take the tree down?
sometime around new years. i believe these questions are better applied to christmas lights, as my family does that with or without me. christmas lights go on on St. Nick's day (dec. 6) and go off bit by bit starting on new years.


5. Do you like eggnog?
i love eggnog. real, store bought, fat free, whatever. eggnog icecream.... mmmmmm


6. Favorite gift received as a child?
hmmm.... i believe that would be a tie between my addy doll (which i helped pay for and received at the same time as a faaabuuulous black and silver sparkly dress that i still wear for dress up parties) and my doll house with all its little tiny pieces of furniture.


7. Do you have a nativity scene?
we have a mexican tin one, tiny and wrapped in tissue paper, that i always put up because it's beautiful. christmas is not a religious holiday in my household.


8. Hardest person to buy for?
dad and brother, about equally. dad this year. i don't want to buy any more fishing lures or ties.


9. Easiest person to buy for?
krb. i always find a million things for her.


10. Worst Christmas gift you ever received?
some of the aunts have been known to send awful clothing.


11. Mail or email Christmas cards?
mail. not very many - mostly i send thank you notes that serve the same updating people on my life purpose.


12. Favorite Christmas Movie?
oh, i don't know.... the claymation christmas special, i believe.



13. When do you start shopping for Christmas?
depends. whenever i starts seeing things that are perfect. i love buying presents, but they have to jump out at me as the perfect gift for a person, which means that i still end up doing much shopping in the days before christmas for those people who haven't yet been found.



14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present?
maybe as a white elephant....


15. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas?
cranberry orange relish. and satsumas. and the tamales i make with my mom.


16. Clear lights or colored on the tree?
colored. many of them.


17. Favorite Christmas song?
the holly and the ivy, silent night, i like a lot of them....


18. Travel for Christmas or stay home?
the only time i've spent christmas away from home was when n was in the hopsital. it was the first night he got to spend outside of his hospital bed. we all stayed at the family house across the street and my dad made him laugh by blowing raspberries on his stomach.

19. Can you name all of Santa's reindeers?
yes. i might have to sing it though.


20. Angel on the tree top or a star?
we actually having a shepherdess. she's vaguely witchlike and has a sparkly purple skirt... i believe my mom traded from her back when she still did craft fairs.


21. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning?
christmas eve is generally uncle tim's box, everything else christmas morning.


22. Most annoying thing about this time of year?
decorations/sales/songs before thanksgiving. crushing crowds. twelve days of christmas at the family/friends christmas eve party. and having to explain what i'm doing to every adult there.


23. What I love most about Christmas?
Finding the perfect present for someone. Decorating. Christmas carols. Going to krb's on christmas afternoon for quiddler and small children. family christmas walk at the beach. making tamales. too many things. i love the holidays.

might as well!

stolen from somethingbookish
because, well, i'm in the middle of watching "Knocked Up" (which i'm enjoying tremendously), but, as rp and i have discovered, we can no longer just watch a movie. i have to multitask.... but i can't generally get anything productive done while watching a movie i haven't seen before, so things like book lists work well. as do facebook, nytimes.com, anthropologie.com, etc.

speaking of which, i bought a sweater coat and jeans today! and i can't find a picture of the silly thing online. so here's a rather fuzzy photo taken with my iphotobooth. i'll try to get a better one tomorrow or something. but really, i'm so happy. it's from macys, not anthropologie, thus not all nice and all-natural fibers, but it's got pockets, is empire waisted with buttons just to the waist, three quarter length sleeved and all knobbly! and soooo comfortable and flattering. very very happy.


anyways, here's the bookthing!

Bold what you have read, italicize your DNFs, strikethrough the ones you hated, put *asterisks next to those you’ve read more than once, and put a + cross in front of the books that are on your bookshelf.

(Note that DNF=”did not finish”)

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
+One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
+Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
+*Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
+War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
+*Emma
+The Blind Assassin
+The Kite Runner
+Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
+*American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
+Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
+Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
+*Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
+*Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
+The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
+Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
+The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
+Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
+The Unbearable Lightness of Being
+*Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
+Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlasa
The Confusion
+Lolita
+*Persuasion
+Northanger Abbey
+*The Catcher in the Rye
+On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
*The Hobbit
+ In Cold Blood
+ White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
+The Three Musketeers