the most wonderful time of the year?

Is it really almost Christmas time? It doesn't feel like it to me...am I the only one? Every year it seems to come sooner, and every year it feels less and less like it...maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety.....maybe I'm becoming more like my mother, God Bless her, who was not fond of Christmas, and despite working in a mall, left all her shopping, be it gift or food, until the very last possible minute, and made me wrap everything (once I grew old enough), even sometimes my own presents ("don't look in this box before you wrap it!!") all the while baking and cleaning house and complaining the whole time that we had too much, didn't appreciate it, and as Christmas dinner wore on and the wine disappeared, telling us how ungrateful we all were....we in turn kept filling her wine glass, because we liked "drunk mum"--she was funny, and said weird things!--and she only drank that one day a year...what can I say, we're a bunch of strange folks in my family. Anyway as I get older I can appreciate what my mother had to go through, all the work, cooking, shopping, cleaning (not so much wrapping as I said earlier, I was the "wrapping beeyotch") and all for one day a year.

My mom was a legendary baker....she made so many good things, like peanut butter logs, and marshmallow rolls, and butter tarts (Oh! the butter tarts!!!) I don't have one favourite, they were all so good! I remember one year (I was about 7 or 8) my mother baked early (in October or November) and put everything, squares, cookies, tarts, goodies, you name it, in the freezer, all nicely packed and ready to pull out Christmas evening. She really had everything organized and all ready to go. After dinner, she went to the freezer to pull out a few tasties for a dessert tray, only to find out that my teenage brother and his teenage friends had been steadily raiding the deep freeze of all the goodies and there were none left for us to eat!....I'm sure she drained an extra bottle that year.

If you have a favourite Christmas memory, can you share it with me? Maybe that will get me into the Christmas spirit...

I've been knitting berets a lot lately....don't know why. I'm not really a hat person, they don't look good on me, but berets, well I can handle one of them...harkens back to my old "Brownie" days I guess. Still, I only have one head, and just how many of them do I need??? One more, apparently:




This is the "Sweet Honey Beret" by Faina Goberstein, from the Winter 2008 issue of Interweave Knits. I have to say I love the honeycomb pattern, even though it took me a while to get used to it (let's face it, it doesn't take much to confuse me!)

And there's the flip side. My first attempt was in a grey(gray?gris?) yarn, which I ran out of on almost the last row, and in trying to 'stretch' said yarn to finish, dropped a stitch and completely arsed it up so bad I frogged it and tried it with this multi-coloured yarn.

Here it is perched on a bowl for an almost 'real head shot'...I made this with a larger needle (more out of necessity than anything else...the needle the pattern called for has a sweater on it currently, so I went a size up) and I made it extra slouchy (like me!) 'cause that's how I like it.