Holiday Rush

Right now while waxjism's & my 6 niblings are between the ages of 4 and 14, her family and their families operate on an Every Other Year Plan & this is her immediate family's year, so this year we will all celebrate Xmas Eve together (which is the main holiday in the Nordic countries). ( It's a Lot. )

And in addition to the things I've got to plan and prepare for all that, last year I made a Solemn Intention that this year I was going to actually learn to make the GOOD glögg (a Nordic traditional mulled wine beverage that is ubiquitous this time of year - like gingerbread and glögg is the special in every cafe all month), because the stuff you 'make' at home is actually just fruit punch concentrate with berries that you heat on the stovetop with wine or liquor in it and then top with raisins and almonds, and it doesn't really taste more than slightly like the good stuff. Of course, anyone who knows how mulling works has already realized, as I did when I tried to look it up, how ambitious that idea was. So that's not happening this year, although we may try purchasing a more expensive brand of the kind you heat up at home - maybe that will help.

Today (or rather, this week) I'm still knitting kind of furiously because I decided I wanted to give a hand-knitted sweater to the 11 9(?)-year-old, and I (OF COURSE) made a significant error at the beginning and it was the ONE part I didn't painstakingly check three times as I went, and then my brain did that helpful thing where I count the stitches and my brain decides to tell me it was the number I expected even when it wasn't, so I was almost completely finished with this sweater and had to unravel both sleeves and the top half and do them over again. (Fortunately, this is a much smaller sweater than any of the adult ones I've made. But it's still taken about a day per sleeve TWICE, and redoing the top half will probably take another day or two.)

After the knitting of the sweater* there's

• one remaining child to knit for or if I run out of time, to buy something for


• A bunch of cards to make - i.e. calligraphy with metallic ink, not TOO time-consuming, but it will take a few hours (I bought a ton of black card blanks and envelopes last year thinking it was universal, but now I really want to do them on red or green)


• Fudge to make & cookies to bake for the Xmas Eve feast: sugar cookies at minimum, but I like to make brown sugar nut kiss meringues (meringues in general are Wax's favorite and these have always been a specialty of my mom's) too, and a third kind - maybe peanut butter oatmeal or green tea sugar cookies - last year's mocha espresso shortbreads were surprisingly a failure! - or maybe something with peppermint candy crush? I've got a bunch of it in the cupboard that I never got around to using.
  
  (I'm thinking of mail ordering red and green glitter sugar from a party shop because nobody ever has it locally and I'm tired of traditional frosting and even more tired of painting with colored egg yolks)

Anyway, only after I'm confident that I will finish all of THAT on time can I dive into trying to install and test out all this new federated fandom stuff - Beaker and Rotonde and Hubzilla and Mastodon etc (I've been getting links via cesperanza and the last was a long detailed post by impertinence).

And I've also got a review post of s1 of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power only halfway finished, because after about 12 hours of writing I realized I couldn't dedicate myself to it until the knitting was done.


*I've already knitted presents for my parents - last month, because the mail to North America takes a few weeks this time of year.