Holiday Must-Have

Day 56: As I grew older, I came to realize something: traditions change. St. Nicholas no longer throws a bag of candy through the back door. Santa doesn't come down the chimney. The screw bases on the old lights don't fit the new strings. The ancient glass ornaments shed their paint like dandruff and are replaced by sets of plastic apples and handmade velvet baubles, which in turn are replaced by wooden birds. Conscience rears its head to dictate that killing a tree is a grievous sin, and an artificial one takes its place. Even now, my traditions are in flux. I've stopped sending cards or even a Christmas letter. The sisters-of-the-heart have decided that this will be our last "12 Days" gift exchange. The tree and almost all the decorations will stay in their boxes because it would be unfair to spend the season reprimanding a small cat for being a cat. But spritz? It's not Christmastime without spritz. I almost always make them on St. Nicholas' Day (I decorated this batch this morning). Sometimes, a week or two later, I make Russian tea cakes (aka "Sandies"), but they are not as traditional as spritz. It may be a small straw, but holding onto it gives me hope.

Build-Your-Own Mistletoe

Day 55: When I was a kid, you used to be able to buy fresh mistletoe in the dime stores, at grocery checkouts, and other common venues. Yes, it had berries on it, but parents warned their kids that they were poisonous (and we listened!), and pet owners either hung the sprigs where their furry friends couldn't reach or pruned the berries off. If there were mistletoe-related fatalities, they were few and far between, but some official body somewhere decided that mistletoe represented an intolerable safety hazard, and it was removed from sale unless already divested of its fruit. One step led to another, and eventually, it became almost impossible to find fresh mistletoe. Now I'm not saying that I was ever kissed beneath a spray of this parasitic plant, no. In fact, I don't recall that ever happening. Still, mistletoe was as much a part of Christmas as ribbon candy and the manger scene. To the best of my knowledge, the only species of mistletoe native to Washington is a micro-mini version occurring on evergreen trees. Oregon's oaks grow a full-sized version, but driving to Oregon to hunt down an obliging oak seemed a rather excessive response to the problem. Instead, I built my own out of Fimo (a bake-in-the-oven polymer clay similar to Sculpey), and I think it looks a lot better than the weird artificials sold in craft stores these days. Does it work? Ask Tippy!