Pseudostoops is doing her annual charity series: she brings attention to lesser-known charities, and then she makes a donation to that charity of $25, plus an additional 50 cents for each comment received on that post. Normally comments are accepted only on the day of the post, but as you may have noticed the internet is sleeping/shopping/baking this week, so comments are lower than usual and she’s still taking comments on Monday’s and Tuesday’s posts. If you have a few minutes, you could give to some very nice charities for a few clicks and a few comments.

I really like her idea, and I’ll do a half-match: I’ll send the charities another 25 cents per comment received on her posts. So for each comment you leave, 75 cents goes to charity, and you can do that three times.

Click here to learn about (and get Pseudostoops and me to donate to) to The Women’s Treatment Center.

Click here to learn about (and get Pseudostoops and me to donate to) Sweet Miss Giving’s.

Click here to learn about (and get Pseudostoops and me to donate to) The Night Ministry.

Tomorrow, she’ll be choosing five charities nominated by commenters, and letting us vote which of the five should get a donation of $50.

It’s a fun idea and a great way to give money without having to, um, give any money.

My new no-gap-waistband jeans from Target? GAPPING CONSIDERABLY. Also, they cause me to have to keep hitching up my unders. You know what I need, is those button-elastic waist-adjusters they put in children’s jeans. My waist is slimmer than the manufacturers expect, given my hip size. (Isn’t that a much nicer way to say my hips are larger than they expect?) And yet I really like the jeans and have worn them three days in a row and I’m going to look for another pair so I’ll be able to launder these.

Do you know what I learned from my recent Party Shopping Expedition? Camis are super-cute. I’d been avoiding them because my shoulders are narrow and rounded and my upper arms are plump (this, I think, tends to go with the leetle waist), but a cami under a flannel shirt is cuter than a t-shirt under a flannel shirt, and no shoulders or upper arms need be exposed if they’d rather not.

I’d bought a black cami to go under the pink shirt I wore, and then I got a dark red (almost burgundy) cami that came as an underlayer to a shirt I wore yesterday and probably never again (it’s the tunic/maternity style and I felt kind of dumb in it), and after I took off the shirt in frustration I wore the cami with a flannel shirt and I felt kind of SASSY exposing so much CHESTAL REGION. It reminded me of those extremely persuasive Charlie perfume ads from the eighties, comparing Charlie to wearing slinky unders with a grey tailored business suit. …I’m not sure, now that I think of it, why that would be, but I still do wear Charlie twenty years later so SCORE, marketers!

And also I bought another cami, a white one. Target has camis in a whole bunch of pretty colors in the misses department, but in plus sizes they have only black and white. Listen, I may be DUTCH and a BAKER but that doesn’t mean I don’t like PRETTY COLORS. And now I am tired of saying cami, so let’s think of something else to talk about.

We’ve been trying various plans for teaching the children that Christmas is a holiday of EXCHANGING gifts, not just RECEIVING them. When I had fewer children, I took them to the store and had them choose something for their grandma, their grandpa, their aunt, their uncle, and their daddy. We did a lot of talking about Thinking About What The Other Person Would Like, but then I let them choose even if I knew it wasn’t a good idea—we’re talking about a $2 gift from a child, so it’s not going to ruin anyone’s Christmas if it doesn’t hit the mark.

But now there are FIVE children. Five $2 gifts for grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle, mother, father—ACK. It’s not just the expense, it’s the TIME it takes to wrap and unwrap and exclaim over all those gifts, and it’s the mountain of small and not-particularly-wanted gifts purchased only to make a point to the child. And that’s with no sibling gifts!

So this year I took the kids out and had them pool their resources, buying ONE present for grandma, grandpa, aunt, and uncle, and using the person’s wish list to help decide on something in the $10 range. It might miss the mark, but it’s ONE thing instead of five. They did still each choose something for their daddy, though, since that seems different.

We’ll see if this works better.

I took this from Girl in a Boy House:

Eggnog or hot chocolate? I like both, but I don’t drink either one very often.

Does Santa wrap the presents or leave them open under the tree? Since we don’t believe, we don’t receive. We try to make up for it so the kids don’t miss out on Christmas, so the only difference is we have to pay for the presents ourselves instead of getting them free from Santa, and the kids thank us for them instead of thanking Santa.

Colored lights on a tree or white? Colored, but I like white ones too.

Do you hang mistletoe? No.

When do you put your decorations up? We don’t have a set day for it, but it’s between Thanksgiving and, say, the end of the first week of December.

What is your favorite holiday dish? Wurstebroodjes (pigs-in-blankets).

Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? ALL of them: we celebrate on Christmas Eve night. I always say it’s a holdover from a family tree of ministers and farmers, plus Dutch/German ancestry, but I don’t actually know that that’s the case.

How do you decorate your Christmas tree? As many ornaments as will fit, none of them matching. A total melee, if that’s the word I want. The kids have been doing it the last few years—first because I was pregnant and too tired/queasy to manage it, and now because they like to. I’d rather have everything evenly spaced, but have grown fond of their “dripping with ornaments, especially on the lower half of the tree” effect. I have an aqua-metallic bead garland. No tinsel or tinsel garland. Candy canes. Colored lights.

Snow: love it or hate it? I like it while it’s falling, and I like it lying prettily on the ground (but not the roads) for Christmas, but basically I hate it.

Can you ice skate? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA no.

What is your favorite holiday dessert? Spiked sherbet floats.

What is your favorite holiday tradition? Driving around looking at Christmas lights on Christmas Eve night, right before opening presents.

Candy canes: yum or yuck? I don’t eat them, but I like them on the tree, and I’ll stir a hot drink with one if I think of it.

Favorite Christmas show? Scrooged, and the tape I made of a bunch of holiday-themed episodes of kids’ programs one year.

This was, as Nicole promised, surprisingly fun to do, and you should copy if you want to.

Also, I am home from the Christmas party, and I had a shot of vodka beforehand and two large glasses of wine during, and I felt JUST FINE. Still anxious, but able to fake it, and also still able to focus my eyes, so it was a happy medium is what I’m saying.

Also, I realized my clothes were a MAJOR STRESSER, and it seemed like “having nothing but jeans, t-shirts, and a funeral outfit” was a situation that it was okay to remedy, so I went out this morning and bought some clothes, and I was dressed PERFECTLY for what everyone else was wearing, which was like a major psychic triumph. I wore dark, slightly flared jeans, dark grey and silver flats, a black cami, and a so-pink-it-was-almost-red button-down shirt with only a few buttons in the middle buttoned and the sleeves rolled up. I also wore sparkly earrings and my (men’s department) belt bracelet and my grandma’s cocktail ring.

And I brought wine, and thank you to everyone who suggested it because it was the perfect thing and roughly half the other people who came also brought wine. Then I had some of THEIR wine, and I ate many yummy little foods, and I talked with wallflowers, and now I am thinking we should go to parties every night! Or never again—either way.

As usual I thought I’d try to get ahead on Christmas stuff this year, and instead what I accidentally did was get an early start on the Post-Holiday Funk. I feel like, here we are a week until Christmas and I’m not even excited yet. Maybe the whole thing is a bust.

Paul, who has been my faithful and patient companion for fifteen Christmasses, said kindly, “Yes, I know. This is your favorite Christmas carol.” My friend Kara Marie, who is getting accustomed to shoring up my teetering psyche, said, “Dude, what’s the worst that can happen if you don’t feel jolly? You know? The sun will still come up the next day.” My mother, whose psyche resembles my own, says, “IS IT TIME TO PANIC??? SHOULD WE CANCEL CHRISTMAS???”

But look! Niestle is here! She is at my parents’ house AS I TYPE!

And perhaps I will bake a Christmassy treat today. And I have some Starbucks Winter Blend coffee I found earlier this week at Target on clearance. And Elizabeth just said perkily, “This would be a perfect day for an outing!” so maybe it would be. And there will almost certainly be more cards in the mail.

But oh dear: we have been invited to a holiday party tomorrow, and I don’t know if you know this about me but I am NON-SOCIAL. I don’t socialize with people unless they are related to me by blood or marriage and are therefore contractually obligated to like me, or else we’ve known each other so long that I feel like it’s their own fault if they didn’t know what they were getting into by choosing to be friends with me.

And I WANT to go to this party, because it is hosted by the parents of William’s best friend Clarissa and their friendship is such a nice one it’s led me to have little pleasant fantasies about Clarissa eventually being the mother of some of my grandchildren, and also I’m so relieved to see that not ALL my children have been afflicted with my non-social genes. But I am all fretful because…well, because I AM. It’s the way I AM. And a thousand people could reassure me that it is no big deal and no one is going to bite me and everything is going to be fine and no one cares how I act GEEZ GET A GRIP, and I could even get it in writing from a deity that everything would go well and I would STILL be fretful, and afterward I would still spend hours/days/years feeling like I arrived/left at the wrong time, that I hogged/ignored the hostess and other guests, that I was too loud/quiet, that I neglected some element of etiquette, that I said something dumb, that my children behaved badly, that I took up too much air and space, whatevs.

Elizabeth is 4-and-a-half. She likes Hello Kitty and she likes crafts.

My parents got her the 35th Anniversary Hello Kitty Colors pack, which contains five small plush Hello Kittys in five different colors.

My brother and sister-in-law bought her a Hello Kitty Dress Me doll, which I’d given up on because it was out of stock on Amazon, but they found her one. (We’d considered the Ty Hello Kitty as an alternative, but I think the Dress Me is way better—more like a doll in shape.)

We got her some pajamas with kitties on them and a Hello Kitty marker-by-number set, but we want to buy her one more thing. Here are some of the candidates:

This is significantly more than I wanted to spend, but a Hello Kitty dollhouse?? I think she would FAINT. Why are dollhouses SO EXPENSIVE?

Hello Kitty clock. I like it, but I had in mind something less practical.

Would she LOVE a stamp set, or would it mean she’d draw less? Would the alphabet stamp set help her when she wanted to write words but couldn’t handle the letters? or would it keep her from continuing to try her letters?

Magnetic dress-up dolls: tons of fun? or tons of pieces lost all over the house? (I’m also considering the boy version for Henry—but why is the boy version costumes instead of outfits?)

Rob just explained to me how the concept of terminal velocity could assist with shoveling. Paternity: established.

I finished my second Knitted Thing!

I used Lion Brand Homespun yarn, in the colors we had on hand. (We have a huge pile of yarn and needles and things from my mother-in-law’s house, and I’d bought the pink and yellow on clearance to practice with.) I found the yarn medium-difficult to work with because it’s all kinked and fuzzy, but I liked trying a different yarn. I cast on 50 stitches, which turned out to be kind of a lot for a beginner: it seemed to take FOREVER to make any progress. I’d intended for the 50-stitch side to be the short side of a rectangle, but I ended up making it the long side.

Rob taught me how to do stripes, so that’s what I was practicing. I didn’t plan how many rows to do each stripe or how many stripes to do of each color. I did pink and added purple, then dropped pink and added blue, then dropped purple and added yellow. Then I felt like I was done, so I stopped. The finished Thing is about 12×17 inches. I am hoping the cat will want to sleep on it, but so far she is shunning it in favor of a piece of bubble wrap. What is it with her and plastic? She’s always licking it or sleeping on it.

[Edit: Look what I found when I went out to the living room!

She accepts it!]

Now I’m working on something I hope will be a knit headband. I wear my hair twisted up in a clip, so hats don’t work. What I want is a hatlet that will go over one ear, across the top of my head (where I have always pictured a heat-venting hole, like a whale’s blowhole, ever since learning as a child that heat is lost through the head), and back over the other ear, tying…somewhere (under the chin seems too bonnetlike, behind the neck seems like it might slip off).

I started it with just a few stitches for near-the-tying-place and then wanted to increase to covering-the-ear width, and Rob and I had learned Knit One Front & Back from the Knit Witch when he needed it for a diagonal-stripe scarf, so I decided to use that. Here’s his scarf in progress:

I was glad Rob had been using Knit One Front & Back for awhile so he could watch and advise. (The best part was when I hesitated and he said “Now catch the sheep…” exactly as if tenderly coaching a young child.) At one point I realized I’d increased in the wrong place, and I said, “Oh! But I can just undo it, right?” and he said, “Yes, but, uh….” and I slipped the two stitches off the needle. Then I didn’t know what to do next. He said, “Yeah, you don’t know what to do with that, do you. Here, give it to me.”

I’m SO much more tolerant of my mother-in-law’s flaws now that she’s dead. It’s not like I see them as less flawlike now. It’s more like—well, let’s say you were having a baby, and you had HORRIBLE labor pain, and you were all, “OMG THIS IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN I’D EVER IMAGINED, DYING DYING DYING!!” And then the baby was born an hour after the first pains began. Well, the pains were still horrible, but they were over so much sooner than expected, and so now they don’t seem as bad. It’s like that.