we interrupt this regularly scheduled holiday ... to show you a painting ... mostly just so that i'll stop eating christmas cookies while i type ....

... oh MY ... my family celebrates christmas .... complete with christmas eve mass and stocking hung by the chimney with care ... but it seems that this year, the holidays were all about cookies! .... i made traditional spritz ... a TRIPLE batch ... good grief what were we thinking ... but for the first year in many, we had a spritz gun that worked WELL and that the kids could manage ... so we just kept making them .... do you know what spritz are? ... you press the dough, in our case, butter cookie dough, through a weird gun ... i've made them every christmas for my whole entire life, i think .... i went through a decade or two of weak spritz presses .. but my new one is great .... so we made twobatches of butter colored spritz ... and one batch of green, or greenish ... all with sprinkles .... and each batch makes about 100 cookies ... they are small cookies, but that's still a lot of cookies, huh?

and then pepperkaker ...

that's our traditional swedish cookie ... it's like a gingerbread ... in fact, we made lots of gingerbread men .... here... read this .... oh wait, that was in norwegian ... maybe you can translate for me?

there's a photo of my floury brigade of bakers, in order: boy.beck.artist (my he's growing tall), girl.beck.artist, mom.of.e.beck.artist(hey mom, have i blogged your pic before?), and little.e.beck.artist ... we did a double batch of pepperkaker because mr.e.beck.artist likes NOT frosted ... and the rest of us LOVE to frost them .... so we needed plenty unfrosted and frosted ....

and ... since it is an artist's blog ... here's a painting i did a few weeks ago ... and i don't think i showed you a pic of it yet ....

thought i should toss that in, lest you forget i actually am an artist ... now... back to the cookie eating i go .... if you are celebrating holidays, i hope they are joyful ... and peaceful ... and that your new year is fab ...

christmas time .....

i made ornaments and ornaments and ornaments this year .... i made christmas trees for most people on my list .... ....but i also made a special set .... this set also had fuzzy white ribbony yarn tied around the tops ... but i forgot to photograph that update before i gave them away ....

have you been making and baking yet? or just shopping?

...believe ...

it doesn't look christmasy ... but the message fits the season .... i sold this small painting today ... i did it with a few other paintings last week ... but i won't show you those yet ... gonna save them for another day, right?

for me, at the moment , believe is perfect .... i believe i'll make it through this day, this week, these holiday events .... my season is even more chaotic than usual ... but .. i believe it'll still be just fine ... it all happens whether you are ready or not, right? i believe that's right ... so ... i'll keep muddling through ... hoping that my best is good enough this time ....

so ... are you feeling it? are you believing?

the tree story ...

last year i bought an orange tree ....

click over to this blog post to catch yourself up on the orange christmas tree story ....

so this year my family just seems all together overscheduled ... things just aren't happening for us ... prior to this weekend, the only christmas thing that we had really done was getting out that orange tree, plugging it in, and decorating it .... but that's something .... an orange tree certainly can get you right into the christmas spirit ....

so ... since our calendar is JAMMED ... i said to the family, hey, why don't we just have the orange tree ... we don't have to get a cut pine tree ... just orange is good, right?

well ... proverbial lead balloon ... no one agreed with me and girl.beck.artist was AGHAST ... maybe even a little angry with me .... i'm pretty sure she thought i was doing the scrooge thing ... i mentioned the no green tree thing a dozen, maybe two dozen times over the course of the week .... but when can we get it? when will we rearrange the living room so that it'll fit (we always have to do that), when will we decorate it? .... still , didn't fly .... mommy, we HAVE to buy a REAL treeeeeeeeee ....

mr.e.beck.artist, boy.beck.artist, and girl.beck.artist went to a high school open house on sunday afternoon and said they'd grab a tree on the way home ... but they got home empty handed ... no tree .... they didn't remember .. well, i guess we don't really need one if you don't remember to buy it .... uproar .... no, no , no ... we NEED a green tree .....

little.e.beck.artist came up to me and whispered, mom, there are 29 dollar trees at costco a block away .... let's go get one and surprise them .. and there you go .... my very own anti-scrooge cindy lou who says costco .... so .... off to costco we went ... and we actually took girl.beck.artist (the one most emotionally invested in the tree ) with us ....

three minute drive to costco ... tree truck outside .... snow still in the tree branches ... nice .... there was a good skinny tree standing up in a stand ... i asked if all the trees were that skinny ... mr.costco.29$.trees said oh no, lots are very full ....

me: no, i need a skinny tree so i don't have to rearrange my furniture ...

so .. we went into costco ( it was snack time so we made the rounds of free samples) ... we bought a poinsettia bigger than some christmas trees .... and paid for our christmas tree .... we went out to mr.costco.29$.trees .... and ordered one that's "not too fat" .... i walked to get the car ... the girls stayed to pick the tree .... i drove up ... and i laughed out loud .... the girls were standing by the absolutely skinniest, spindliest, narrowest christmas tree i've ever seen ... seven feet tall and seven inches wide with all its tied upness .... skinny, skinny, skinny ... it will not need living room rearranging! .... and it might just be a charlie brown tree .. it was hard to tell ... it was just so darn skinny ...

mr.costco.29$.trees tied ours to the roof ... not in the middle, but right on the edge, tucked in next to the roof rack .... it took up about a tenth of the mini van roof ... do you get how skinny it is?

we drove it home .... girl.beck.artist was a little defensive when i said it might be a charlie brown tree .... we pulled up .... mr.e.beck.artist and boy.beck.artist came out with scissors ... and laughed ... boy.beck.artist could easily carry the tree himself .... he could have juggled with it if he wanted ... skinny AND light ....

we took the green skinny tree in and tried to get it in our tree stand ... but the stand was too big .... so we found our old stand and it worked perfectly for the dainty stump ... before un-tying the branches, boy.beck.artist got the star on .... then we untied the string and the branches remained motionless ... the skinny tree was still skinny ... the branches did not drop down, fill out, move at all .... so .... we started pulling on them .... they have to come down some, don't they?

many ornaments later, those branches were coming down nicely .... our skinny tree filled out quite a bit .... but i didn't have to move the couch, the piano or the table ....

ready or not, christmas is coming .... we might actually be ready in time!

how about you?