I was planning on telling you how I'm so happy to be in Winter Wonderland (a.k.a. Quebec city) and, don't get me wrong, I'm trilled to be home and visit with family and friends. But after a mere hour of sleep in the last 32hrs and 3 flights including a red eye, my Holiday spirit has not yet reached it's full potential. I've been crashing on the couch, knitting and watching Netflix for the last few hours, killing time until I can reasonably go to sleep. Wrapping presents will have to wait. So instead of telling you about my parent's lovely Christmas tree and the festive preparations, I thought I'd share with you this problem I have with my hands. The thing is, they are really small. Short of buying kids mittens, I almost inevitably end up with mittens that are way too big for me, floppy thumbs and all. It's actually quite annoying. Being able to knit some myself has been pretty amazing, especially since I figured out how to M1 without creating a hole. Basic, I know, but see, I decided to make mittens as one of my very first projects, cable mittens to be exact, because apparently I was thinking go big or go home. They were fine, well, after giving up on the cable they were better than not having mittens, but looking back I feel a little bad for friends who were given these beginner's mittens with holes around the thumbs. So there you have it, I'm sorry, but I was super excited, completely ignoring my mistakes, and one day I'll replace them with better ones, promise.

Photo credit Heather Hands

Christmas is in less than 10 days, and I am completely unprepared. Last year, I had it all planned out. I made our own Christmas cards, had them stamped and mailed in plenty of time. I decorated the house, even bought a cute rosemary tree and filled it with small ornaments, to comply with our loft's spacial challenges. I had my knitted gifts done and sent with some time to spare. A true Christmas miracle. This year, not so much. Maybe it's our recent trip to this great place - more on that later - or the fact that we are going to Quebec city to celebrate the Holidays with my family this year, making it seem like it's not really Christmas until we see snow. Maybe it's that the weather here has been quite warm and sunny, or maybe, just maybe, it's that I've been drinking bubbly and procrastinating. Either way, the last minute scramble is here, and I'm maintaining a decent amount of constant panic, balanced out by some serious excitement to be home for Christmas. Since graduating, work has rarely allowed me to travel during this time of year, and I'm feeling very lucky, thrilled to be in my favourite winter wonderland for the Holidays. So today, I'm putting Love Actually in the background, displaying my adorable snow globe on my desk, and while Graham is browsing the internet to complete his Christmas shopping, I'm getting ready for a creative marathon. Wish me luck.

We live just a few blocks from West Elm, which has proven to be extremely handy quite a few times. Hosting a party and realizing at the last minute that we are short on serving plates? I'll be back in 20. While cleaning out the storage unit we got rid of the wrong size duvet? I've got a new one, much more expensive than our old Ikea one, but oh so much more cozy. No regrets. It's also been pretty nice on really cold days, when it's obvious that Noodle needs more exercise, but I am not enjoying the walks. See, sometimes I'll go in and walk around with Noodle. Often he insists on going and I have to convince him that it's not happening. But sometimes I cave in, and even, sometimes, I instigate.  Noodle loves it because once in a blue moon I let them give him a treat, and I just love to go walk through the sales section, or just look for decor inspiration. I usually do a good job at only looking at the sales, but this time, everything was so festive and exciting that I did a systematic walk through, and left with a bag. They got me right at the entrance, when I spotted this amazing sweatshirt. How could I not. And then, the snow globes. Is there anything more festive than a snow globe? I mean, probably, actually, I'm sure there is. But I love snow globes. Right now, looking at my snow globe makes me pretty happy. 

As many households are slowly recovering from this weekend's festivities, we are back into our routine, looking forward to a few upcoming trips, trying to finalize our New Year's plans, and I'm starting to really get into the Holiday spirit. This Holiday weekend we avoided the large meals (mostly), the crowds, the shopping, and instead hung out at home like we rarely do, cooked some simple meals, played with the dogs and watched movies. It was the perfect balance of being social and staying in our pj's until late, of exercising and relaxing, and I have to say, it feels pretty great. It's hard for me to get excited for two Holidays that come so close together, especially since we celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving already, so I've decided that Christmas should get all my attention. I think that it's seeing snow on the ground on Friday that did it for me. I got excited like a kid at Christmas, loudly expressing my joy to a very sleepy Graham, and putting on my warmest coat and handmade knits to go walk outside. Graham never understands how I can get so happy and enthusiastic with the snow, when I'm pretty much cold 10 months out of the year. I have to admit I'm not sure what it is, and I definitely never loved winter growing up. Maybe it's the knowledge that snow is so ephemeral here, that the mountains will soon await, with winter kept a safe distance away, or that we will soon be in winter wonderland, going home for Christmas. Either way, I'm happy, or at least was until Noodle pulled on his leash on a thin patch of ice, and I almost fell over. Insert your favourite cartoon character dancing with his legs up in the air here.

How freaking adorable are these? Seriously, I started making them and just couldn't stop. I remember hearing about the fact that babies are born with (long!) nails, and that you need to have little teeny tiny baby mitts for them in the hospital so they don't scratch their faces. Crazy. I never looked it up until just now, but remember learning from a reputable source that yes, nails develop pretty early, and so as I was making my little baby gifts packages a few weeks back, I decided to make little mitts, because scratched faces sounds bad. Turns out, apparently, newborn nails are very soft and flexible, so maybe not scratching material, but hey, would you want to leave it to chance? Also, why would you want to skip on the cute tiny little mitts?

I hope you all had a good Halloween weekend. If you follow me on Instagram, you know that we had some pretty awesome costumes this year. You may think that I'm the creative one and therefore came up with the idea or executed it, but actually I had very little to do with it. For some reason Halloween doesn't really inspire me. Graham came up with the idea of going as Pac-man a few weeks ago, and started talking about costume construction, and how he needed to go shopping at the fiberglass store and had downloaded some programs to help him design the costume. That totally terrified me, as he wanted me to go as Mrs Pac-man; his reassurance that the costume would be comfortable and practical was far from convincing me. I declared that I would go as the maze, and then nothing happened for a while, or more specifically until 7pm on October 30th. At that time, it became clear that procrastinating was no longer an option, and Graham started drawing the maze on my black long sleeve shirt, and I started taping blue electric tape over it. I added white dots and a ghost, because... well it was a must, and Graham ended up leaving for our friend's place for further construction of his costume. Turns out our friends fully embraced our theme, and made the most amazing Pac-man fruit costumes, with felt, totally looking like they were made of large pixels. I thought they were awesome, until they blew my mind by dropping the fruits, showing the number of points collected. Best group costumes ever. Except maybe for Graham's challenging time going through doorways and climbing flights of stairs.