Most of us have to make other people’s surnames plural only once a year, when we address and sign holiday cards. Most of us fail pitifully, even with our OWN surnames, so it is fortunate it doesn’t matter one bit in any sort of “will cause children to starve” or “will worsen the state of the environment/economy” sense. But if you would LIKE to get it right, I am here to help.

Here is my first and best technique: AVOIDANCE. If you write it “The _____ family,” you can put their surname unaltered where the line is and be done with it: “The Sampson family.” “The James family.” “The Moss family.” And of course you could also write “Jim, Melanie, Caden, Olivia, and Isabella Sampson” and be done with it that way, too, but goodness, that is a lot of writing, and also sometimes I am not entirely sure I have all the first names straight.

If you choose to avoid avoidance, we will begin with the easiest: straightforward surnames such as Sampson. If you want to address the envelope to the entire household of Sampsons, it’s a simple plural like cat/cats and you add S at the end: “The Sampsons.”

• NOT: The Sampson’s, which makes no sense.
• NOT: The Sampsons’, which is a structure that would need to be followed by a word telling us what it is they are the owners of, such as a boat or a cat. You might be able to justify writing it The Sampsons’ if you argued that “Residence” was implied, but I’d save that iffy excuse for if you mess it up accidentally.

Mid-level difficulty next: surnames ending in S, such as James. If you want to address the envelope to the entire household of Jameses, it’s the regular plural for words ending in S, like bus/buses: you add ES, and it’s “The Jameses.”

• NOT: The James’, which makes no sense.
• NOT: The Jameses’; see The Sampsons’, above.
• NOT: The Jamesses.

Highest difficulty last: surnames ending in double-S, such as Moss. This is the same as surnames ending in S, but the doubleness of the S throws people off: it’s “The Mosses,” just exactly as with dress/dresses and kiss/kisses.

• NOT: The Moss’, which makes no sense.
• NOT: The Mosses’; see The Sampsons’, above.

If you are feeling confused, you can take comfort in the fact that you are obviously in the majority. If you want it boiled down to something simpler, remember this one thing: NO APOSTROPHES. Got it? NO APOSTROPHES. Not in your own name, either: sign it “With warm holiday wishes from the Jameses,” not “the James’s” or “the James’ ” or “the Jameses’,” or, heaven help us, “The Jame’s.” Why? Because NO APOSTROPHES, that’s why. We are only making things PLURAL (for more than one person in the household), NOT contracting words or discussing who owns what.

But again, my choice is addressing it to “The James family” and signing it “The Thistle family.” Then it’s no apostrophes AND no plurals. This also helped me with a former acquaintance whose family’s surname was Spear, and who got very pissy each year when cards arrived addressed to “The Spears” (which is CORRECT) and she would say, “It’s SPEAR, it’s SPEAR, it’s not like Britney!!” So I addressed my card to “The Spear family” and therefore did not get rebuked for being RIGHT.

I don’t think I have EVER DONE anything as frustrating as trying to build graham cracker gingerbread houses. EVER. I’d thought it would be pretty easy, because the kids have done it in school and it seems like with that kind of adult/child ratio it MUST be a pretty easy project. And maybe it IS if you do it right, but that is NOT HOW IT WENT DOWN.

Just for starters, half the graham crackers in the box were broken. (Okay, fine, it was more like a fourth, but I’m CRABBY and it FELT like half.) Several others broke while we were trying to assemble the houses. (Fine: ONE broke.) I’d spent $3 to get a box of the brand-name ones because the school sign-up sheet emphasized that it was important to use the brand-name ones.

THEN, I got a royal icing recipe online, and even went out and bought pasteurized egg whites for it ($1.89 per cup—ack), and the recipe was a TOTAL FLOP. It was the consistency of…I’m not sure what it was the consistency of, but I could pour it, and when I tried to use it as glue (oh, that’s it: it was the consistency of Elmer’s glue), it just ran and dripped all over the place. The parts that DID stick together kept falling apart.

I believe I’ve mentioned before that I’ve got a flash temper: I get too mad, too fast. As I’ve pointed out to the children in our discussions about how everyone has character flaws to work on, the upside to this particular character flaw is that I also get over it fast. (I still remember with a cringe my grandfather’s temper, which was silent and simmering and wouldn’t be over until he apparently reset in his sleep.) But the downside is that when things are frustrating, I don’t, um, cope well. Nor is my non-coping particularly, um, silent.

So then I took a little break and, in thinking over how things had gone, realized that in addition to needing to find a workable way to do the houses since otherwise it would be too disappointing to the children, I needed to fix how things had gone with our first attempt, to avoid leaving them with the Happy Holiday Memory of “the time we were going to make gingerbread houses but then mom went into a frustrated rage and called the whole thing off like a JERK.”

In years of coping with temper, I’ve learned it’s far better when angry not to indulge in the deep satisfaction of breaking something, because the satisfaction is momentary but the clean-up is significantly more time-consuming. It’s the same with the kind of damage a temper does to children: it requires clean-up, and the clean-up takes significantly longer than the event itself.

I started by going out and saying things like “Whew, that was frustrating, wasn’t it?” I explained that sometimes when something is frustrating, it’s better to take a little break instead of getting mad. Then I said I was sorry for getting so frustrated and mad, and I said things like, “When we’re frustrated, are we supposed to say “AAAAAAA THIS ISN’T WORKING PERFECTLY THE VERY FIRST TIME, SO FORGET THE WHOLE THING!!”? and they’d say “Nooooooooooo!!” and laugh. So step one (indicating end of tantrum, apologizing for tantrum, and breaking the ice by making fun of self while simultaneously delivering lesson on correct handling of something I’d handled incorrectly) was complete.

Then I said we WOULD try again, because it would be too disappointing to just NOT DO IT, and they agreed. I said we’d have to do it another day because we were out of time for today and still needed to find a new frosting recipe, but that we WOULD do it—we would just need to find a way that would work better than the way we’d tried it the first time. They were relieved and happy and saying “Yeah! And maybe NEXT time it will work!” Step two (reassurance, plus contradiction of anything I might have said in the heat of the moment, plus delivering of “try, try again” lesson) complete.

Then I suggested we go to the kitchen and consider the results of our first efforts. We sighed and laughed over the two “successes” (extremely sloppy and dripping and tippy, but TECHNICALLY crackers glued together in a rectangle) and the one total failure, which had tipped over completely. I took a bite of one of the collapsed pieces, and it was really good, so I handed out iced graham crackers to everyone, and we stood in the kitchen eating them and commenting how yummy they were and talking more about what we might try next time. Third step (laughing at what had been frustrating, having a fun and unexpected treat, plus getting to see what the completed houses might taste like when we DID succeed) complete.

So. We are still ON for our Gingerbread! House! Adventure!, but with just a little tantrum learning experience added to the schedule. Day one (yesterday): going out and choosing the candies for decoration. Day two: supposed to be the day for making our own gingerbread houses but rescheduled as a learning experience day. Day three: trying again. Day four: visiting local gingerbread village and being even more impressed now that we’ve tried it ourselves. Day five: eating our gingerbread houses.

I am going to tell you how the Christmas Tree Thing went down. And I would like to warn you in advance that it ends with us having a tree I dislike. But I dislike it so much, it has gone straight past the whole unpleasant realm of Disappointment-‘n’-Regret into an entirely DIFFERENT realm where every time I look at the tree I laugh audibly. Like, long peals of merry laughter. So it may seem as if this is a SAD story, but to me it is not. Here it is:

One morning, after much dithering and fretting on my blog and much reading of the resulting comments sections, I felt in the right mind/mood to tackle the task. After the two older children went to school, I told the three younger that we were going to have a Christmas! Tree! Adventure! And they lost their little minds with uninformed delight, which reminded me of when Rob was 2 years old and we told him we were going to go Vote!! and he lost his mind and then we spent the next couple of weeks talking him down from that disappointment.

I collected a measuring tape, a saw, the addresses of two nearby Christmas tree farms, and heavy gloves. Except all I could find was ONE single heavy glove. So the first step of our Christmas! Tree! Adventure! was going to a gardening store and buying work gloves. We bought two pairs, and we bought one of those Christmas tree skirts that turns into a body bag afterward. The store also sold Christmas trees, so we looked at them, but we were unimpressed.

Second step: drive to a Christmas tree farm!!! to see how Christmas trees are grown!! Hitch: the Christmas tree farm had closed down.

Third step: drive to second Christmas tree farm!!! to see how Christmas trees are grown!! We looked all around. After 15 seconds, the children were complaining about being cold. After 2 minutes, Edward was also complaining about being so! very! tired! But I felt like a Good and Interactive Mother for bringing them on this adventure.

Henry: “I need my hood up before I freeze!!” Edward: “I am 1 minute and 45 seconds from claiming that I cannot walk another step!”

We found a few trees we liked Okay, but nothing that made me feel like Purchasing. Most of them seemed to be Weird Shapes (i.e., not the perfect symmetry we’re accustomed to from our fake tree). (Note: Many of them now look PERFECT to me as I see them in the background of all the pictures, with that Wrong Tree in our living room.)

And now it was lunchtime. And after that, the twins had to go to kindergarten. After THAT, an ever-decreasingly-enthusiastic Henry and I continued on our Christmas! Tree! Adventure!

First we went to a fancy gardening store. Henry was asleep, so I left him in the car and browsed within sight of the car. All balsams and frasers, despite claims of many varieties. I considered a live potted tree, but the scrawniest and smallest was $85, and oh dear no thank you. All the other trees looked exactly the same as all the others, despite having designations such as “deluxe.”

So then Henry and I went to Lowe’s. We looked around. Hm, more balsams and frasers. I pulled out some trees to look at, but each one looked the same as all the others. Then Henry needed to go potty, which was timely because I’d been fretting about how to walk out without buying a tree. On our way out we bought a small potted Alberta spruce for $7.95, because why not. I’m putting it on our front steps for now, and I’ll bring it inside right before Christmas, then bring it back outside afterward and plant it in the spring.

We went to Home Depot. They had only balsams. All the balsams looked exactly the same as all the other balsams we’d seen that day. I made a decision: we were not going to strap a looks-like-all-the-others-everywhere-else tree to our car when we could carry one home from right around the corner.

Henry and I went home. The other kids came home from school. We all went around the corner, looked at the frasers, couldn’t tell the difference between them because they all looked the same, chose one at random, and carried it home.

Left to right: Edward, Henry, Rob, Swistle, William, Elizabeth.
(Elizabeth is carrying the tree stand, which I’d brought with me in case that would be a good idea.)

Hey, look, I think this is Paul’s first appearance on this blog! He’s in the orange shirt, lying on the floor and trying to tighten the screws of the tree stand. Luckily he asked a CHILD to hold the tree straight, which is why we later found the tree is totally not straight at all. And also, I forgot to first put down the tree skirt that changes into a body bag. And also we were like, “Hey, what are these weird little caps that came with the tree stand?” and it turns out they were supposed to go on the screws that we instead screwed directly up against the tree. And also we forgot to trim the branches off the bottom first. And also by the time we realized we should just take it out of the stand, take it outside, cut off the extra bottom branches and start over, I’d already watered it, so all of that was impossible. And it turns out the “easy watering access” doesn’t help at all with figuring out how much water is in the tray, or how full I can fill it. Yays!

AND, do you remember how all of you were like, “A tree looks much smaller on the lot than it will look in your house,” and I was like “Okay,” and you were like, “No, seriously, WAY SMALLER,” and I was like “I GET IT!” And the tree is way too big for our living room. Furthermore, it’s not even conical, it’s pretty much egg-shaped with a stinger coming out of the top. A bumblebee tree! And it’s very densely branched—where will the ornaments have room to hang? And it has barely any scent at all, unless you get sap on your hands, and by you/your I mean me/my.

It’s such a Wrong Tree from beginning to end, it is in its own way a delight. Finally I have hurdled the, er, hurdle, of purchasing a once-living tree. Finally I have made many (MANY) of the mistakes I feared making. And look! It is not a disaster, it is just a Tree Not of Our Style in our living room for a few weeks! And next year we will have more information to work with!

Oh hi! Is there a Kathy who reads here, who entered the holiday cookie giveaway at Hello Fancy Pants? Because you won! And you need to email Anne because she is MAILING OUT THE COOKIES TO THE WINNERS RIGHT NOW!! (She is sending me a box, too, and NO, I am NOT sitting with my back against the mailbox post, texting on my phone while I wait.)

I mentioned on Twitter that I ordered 75 copies of an outtakes photo for the Christmas cards this year, and then decided they weren’t funny enough and that I wouldn’t send them. I said I was thinking of it in terms of sunk costs: that is, I can’t get my money back on the photos EITHER WAY, so at this point the decision is whether to send them or not send them, but the money doesn’t enter into it at all because at this point the money is “sunk”—not retrievable, so irrelevant.

The replies have made me think probably I should get a second opinion. So I will show you my Holiday Card Outtakes Collection (4 photos on one 4×6 print, included with the picture that turned out well enough), and you tell me if (1) I’m right, and this is not worth sending along with the picture that DID make it, or (2) I’m wrong.

I’ll put a poll over to the right. Keeping in mind that already there will be a 4×6 print that is The Best of the Bunch, should I ALSO include this divided-in-4 print of some of the outtakes? Or are they just “meh” this year, and I should skip it?

Carmen is the winner of the pink salt! And although I know intellectually that every entry has an equal chance of winning, it still seems pretty cool when the very last (or very first) entry wins, and she was the very last entry! I’ll email you, Carmen, to find out where you’d like it mailed!

So! So so so! This weekend I went on a mini-vacation without Paul or the kids. I went to see my brother (Erik), sister-in-law (Anna), sister-in-law’s sister (Lottie), and niece (Niestle). First there was the mini-roadtrip to get there. I brought with me CDs, a large coffee, and a 9×13 pan full of mini-cupcakes I made with the leftover cake batter from the bake sale cake plus the second bake sale cake I had to make when the first one was uncooked in the middle. (I got cocky and thought I didn’t need the toothpick test. OH HUBRIS.)

I see nothing funny about these CD choices.
John Denver is awesome,
and so is Blink-182.

(For those of you who have the Blink-182 album and are wondering why the, er, “nurse” is on the inside of the case instead of on the outside: I turned the cover around because I prefer to look at young men in boxer shorts.)

I arrived mid-afternoon, and Erik stayed home with Niestle while Anna, Lottie, and I went to a big musical Christmas variety show, in the kind of theater with enormous high ceilings with, like, nymphs painted on them, with gilt and velvet EVERYWHERE, and a wreath the size of a minivan. We had a wonderful time. One highlight: at one point there was a sober recitation of The Life of Jesus: he was born, he was a carpenter (wait, we seem to be veering away from the Christmas part of this story), and when he was 30 years old the tide of popular opinion turned against him and he was killed but rose again (Easter, this is the EASTER story now). Out of the darkness, the incredulous voice of a little girl in our row: “He DIED??” Another highlight: ACTUAL LIVE CAMELS. Another highlight: muscular young men wearing snug bright pink. Another highlight: The Twelve Days of Christmas with chicken-dancing for the “three French hens” part.

Then we went home, and Niestle was already asleep, and so the four of us grown-ups had tacos and wine and mini-cupcakes. The plan was to play Pictionary, but after my brother found out he’d have to be partners with me again, we somehow never got around to it, and instead stayed up until midnight talking about all the ways our respective parents neglected and mistreated us (KIDDING, kidding, parents who read this blog!). Erik and I totally trumped Anna and Lottie with our Childhood Illness stories: we both got croup a lot; Erik has a systemic poison ivy story and a near-fatal asthma attack story; I have a nowhere-near-as-good-but-still-pretty-good pneumonia story and a tonsillectomy story, plus I can add the Big Sister Cam to his stories. Anna and Lottie were like, “Let’s see…I think we must have had some colds.” WE WIN. (So it’s good we did this instead of Pictionary, because um.)

Then I slept until ten in the morning. TEN.

TENNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN.

We discussed brunch. Erik and Anna said we could do a Mexican scramble, or we could do French toast, or we could have Belgian waffles. We weighed the options indecisively, and then Lottie said, “I’m in the mood for sweet AND savory—so why don’t we have the Mexican scramble and then finish off the cupcakes?” SOLD.

I left reluctantly, but it was a very pretty day for a drive home. I listened to the radio and felt a leeeeetle silly being a mid/late-thirties mother-of-five singing vigorously “We will never be! never be! anything but loud and nitty-gritty, dirty little freaks!,” but not as silly as you might expect (slash-hope).

This is skimpy because I am on a 24-hour vacation WITHOUT ANY CHILDREN! More on this when I get back!

********

I got an assignment to spend $25 at HomeGoods on a gift for someone, and I decided to spend it on one of you: you can enter my fancy pink salt giveaway through December 6th, which is the day after tomorrow so hurry up. I can mail it to you, or if you want me to send it directly to another U.S./Canadian address I can do that too. I’ll even wrap it and put a gift tag on it (from YOU, of course!).

New gift ideas post at Milk and Cookies: Gift ideas for people you don’t like.

Alert! Alert! Amazon has a deal today on some of their Melissa & Doug toys. I lovvvvvvvve Melissa & Doug. I’ll quick point out some favorites, but then you need to get over there before stuff sells out: some of these Amazon deals are gone before I decide what to buy. (All images from Amazon’s site.)

Abby & Emma Deluxe Magnetic Dress-Up, $10. I bought this for Elizabeth to give as a gift at the next birthday party she goes to, but maybe I should have gotten one for her, too. In fact, I think I will, right after I finish here.

Bake and Decorate Cupcake Set, $10. My mom bought this for the kids to play with at her house, and it is pretty much the biggest success ever. The only thing I wish were different is that the cupcake papers are ACTUAL cupcake papers. Downside: those are going to need to be replaced pretty regularly. Upside: easy and cheap to replace. Still, silicone would have been better and smarter for a children’s toy, I think. I bought one for a future party gift anyway. $10 is EXACTLY what I like to spend on a birthday party gift.

Deluxe Picnic Basket Fill & Spill, $10. These are so great for babies.

Deluxe Sandwich-Making Set, $10. This is the one _I_ want to play with.

Okay, enough messing around! You don’t need me to show you every single one while they sell out under your feet, when you can just as easily go look for yourself.

Yesterday’s not-awkward shopping trip was at Walmart, and I have another Walmart pricing report. I’ve been unhappy to see at Target that the 20-pound bags of Iams cat food have gone up more than $10 over the past few years, from being about $24 to now being $35. So I checked the price at Walmart when I was there yesterday, and danged if it wasn’t $25! So I was hauling it into my cart, and….wait. It’s a 14-pound bag. Designed to be the same size/shape as the 20-pound bag, so that if you didn’t happen to look at the weight you’d think you were saving $11. Well-played, Walmart, but I win this round.

Now. We need to discuss Christmas trees. I’m going to buy a dead one this year for the first time, instead of using our fake tree. I have taken the first step: I have purchased a Christmas tree stand. But now I don’t know what the next step is. Just…go choose a tree? Here are the issues plaguing my mind:

1. Do I buy it at the cool gardening store or at the animal shelter or at the place within sight of our house? I’d like to support the animal shelter, but when I drove by it looked like they had a small selection of trees, and that most of the trees were wrapped up. The cool gardening store had a huge selection, but I know from past pumpkin-purchases that they tend to be significantly overpriced. The nearby place, it would be awesome to just go get it and carry it home, rather than messing with the car—but it looks like they have basically one kind of tree.

2. You might wonder why I don’t just go LOOK and SEE what kind of trees each place has, rather than driving by and guessing. I feel weird about browsing at a tree place and then leaving without a tree. Do people…do that? Plus, I don’t even really know what kind of tree I should be wanting.

3. I want a tree that smells really piney. I don’t know which kinds do that. It seems like in the open air it would be hard to tell.

4. Those trees are just SITTING THERE, and it seems like they should be in buckets of water or something. I’m worried I’ll buy a tree that was cut a week ago, and it will turn all brown and crispy before Christmas. Maybe I should wait to buy the tree. Or maybe I should go to a cut-your-own place? But that brings up so many more issues about saws and so forth. Wait, I’ll bet I need a saw to cut bits off a non-cut-your-own anyway.

5. I feel awkward about doing tests for tree freshness.

6. I want a tree that’s nice and sparse, so there’s plenty of room for ornaments. Maybe all the choices will be TOO FULL.

All right, I feel better. Now I think I can go look for one. I think I’ll go to the nearby place this year, to simplify things. Oh, wait, that gives me a new one:

7. Can one person carry a tree by herself? And I don’t think I have heavy gloves—or at least, none that weren’t stored in such a way that they might now have spiders in them.