Wenchypoo explains here why she skips Thanksgiving and Christmas entirely. It is more interesting and more convincing than John Grisham.

I would never consider doing that, because I love the holidays. Blessing and I were talking about that yesterday. She said that people who are miserable at the holidays and don’t enjoy them shouldn’t be allowed to celebrate them.

I see her point.

I questioned how that could be arranged.

She thought that an official card would do it. It would explain that because they had a bad attitude and were spoiling the holiday, they would henceforth be forbidden to celebrate it. It could be handed over to people like a parking ticket.

I am still reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, interspersing it with novels (right now, the excellent 77 Clocks by Christopher Fowler). But yesterday I was reviewing a new science series, and I was stunned.

It was Millikin’s Kingdoms of Life. I was startled to learn that viruses aren’t necessarily living things, and that the position of oldest, biggest living thing in the world is no longer held by redwood trees, but by a 38-acre, 100 ton fungus.

But it was not the facts that most amazed me.

It was the drama of the whole thing. Oh, the animal kingdom has its drama of course. In the book on the subject one could find venomous platypi, indifferent amphibian parents, and fabulously successful arthropods. Not my words. These books make the whole panoply of life sound like a soap opera.

The protista throw up a fruited body now and then, even if they only resort to sex when under stress.

But perhaps the grandest image of all was that of the great battle among the monera. The new, aerobic bacteria arose — and I don’t think any operas have been written about this yet — and the anaerobic monera were cast out, dying in their thousands as the atmosphere became charged with oxygen, till the few miserable survivors slunk off to live in swamps, the depths of the ocean where the water is 400 degrees hot, and the digestive tracts of mammals. 

Don’t feel sorry for them. They would, the author assures us, “feel at home in a flask of boiling hydrochloric acid.” But can’t you just see Mel Gibson doing this story?

Oh, and when they get to the saga of the spirochetes — !

May your holiday preparations be less dramatic than that. Oh, and not involve any monera. Or protista.

Our anthem yesterday was “Sing to the Lord of Harvest.” This is a traditional Thanksgiving hymn, but I had never sung it before. The reason may be there in the second stanza:

“By Him the clouds drop fatness…”

In our music, someone had crossed out “fatness” and written in “beauty.” Evidently, people don’t care to sing about fatness. The syllable “fat” is on a half note, so it is a long “faaatness.” Rather than just not singing it, the previous director had apparently decided to substitute “beauty.”

We rehearsed it that way, but it bothered me. The rest of the stanza has “goodness,” “fullness,” and “gladness.” “Beauty” doesn’t have the near-rhyme of the other words, and it doesn’t fit, and it is hard to know what it might mean in this context.

I brought this up.

“What did ‘fatness’ mean?” the director scowled.

“Well,” said I, “it went with ‘large increase’ and ‘fullness’ and ‘harvest.’ They liked fatness in those days.”

The clouds dropping fatness presumably had something to do with rain bringing growth and harvest and stuff like that.

I proposed “sweetness.” Not that it is all that much more meaningful than “beauty,” but at least it sounds right. The choir agreed, and the director acquiesced.

But it got me thinking. We are squeamish about music nowadays, of course, and often people won’t sing hymns with words like “blood” or “breast” or “white” or “battle.”

These are in many cases the same people who will listen outside of church to songs with words like ”*@#&” and “*&%^$$#.”

Anyway, my Sunday School class began a study on body image yesterday. The topic also arose back when I went to Sunday School with the old ladies. Their body issues were things like not being able to move quickly or having such thin skin that it tore when touched. After someone brings up that kind of stuff, you are not going to complain about figure flaws, are you?

But now I teach the senior high Sunday School class, and for those kids, body image is all about fatness. Our book said that 80% of teen girls are unhappy with the way they look. When I read that out, there was a chorus of agreement.

The guys were not immune — teen boys want to be bigger and more muscular, and some of them also worry about being fat — but for the girls, how they think they look affects, or even determines, how they feel that day. They were talking about “sweat pants days” and worrying about looking fat.

“And other girls can be cruel,” said one, “They’ll come right up to you and say you look like a fat cow.”

One of the boys said, toward the end of our discussion, “I don’t get it. Girls are always talking about how they want to be skinny, and they are so pretty.”

He’s right. Some of the girls in the group are slim and some are plump, but they are all pretty. By the time they grow up and become confident about their looks, they will have wasted years when they could have enjoyed their youth and health and strength. I suggested to them that on Thanksgiving — which one of the girls described as “Another chance to have a negative body image” — they spare a moment to be thankful for their bodies, and for how well they work. There was a rousing silence.

I liked the Hallowe’en brooch I made so well that I made one for Thanksgiving, too.

I also finished the fairy Christmas tree ornaments. They still look primitive, but I think they will be pretty on the tree anyway. These are a Christmas present, but I have activated Crazy Aunt Purl’s special Christmas Present Filter, which prevents recipients from seeing their gifts. So, if you can see them, then they are not for you.

I knitted up the fifth skein of gray yarn, in the form of the first sleeve of #2 son’s sweater.

And then I made soup and cookies for the boys’ lunches this week.

They have the entire week off for Thanksgiving.

They plan to spend the week playing video games. A few gym visits, gymnastics for #2 son, but otherwise they will be playing Final Fantasy and NBA 2007.

Since I am working and they are not, I have plans for them to help out with cooking and cleaning.

They met this idea with a rousing silence.

I soldered. I knitted. I bought things to put into stockings. My boys came along on the errands and so I also bought winter jackets and negotiated credit for used video games (in case you’ve ever thought of doing that, they give you about 10% of the initial purchase price).

And then it was time to sing madrigals on the square.

I don’t know whether you’ve ever worn madrigal-singing costumes. They aren’t just for singing. People wear them at Renaissance Faires and Society for Creative Anachronism dos. An entomologist of my acquaintance said that they were so much more becoming than modern clothing, he didn’t know why women couldn’t just wear them all the time. Since I was in sweeping bottle-green velvet at that moment, rather than my usual jeans and sweaters, I could hardly disagree.

But I have only worn them for singing madrigals. And I think that they really are imper fect for that purpose. The preferred silhouette in these dresses is the one shown here in Tiziano’s “Venetian Bride.” The torso is supposed to be an entirely flat rigid shape.

When you sing, you of course expand the ribcage to get plenty of breath so you can get through all the “Fa la la la”s without having to break off and breathe again.You can see the contradiction here.

The situation was complicated last night by the fact that we were out in the cold. It is harder to breathe in the cold.

So there you are, trussed up like a chicken to get the flat front plus cleavage effect, and breathing in 35 degree air, and the whole question of breath control becomes more complex.

This is the catalog picture of my dress, by the way. That is definitely not me wearing it, and mine was red, but you get the idea.

We had fun.

The little lady who gave the bitter speech a couple of weeks ago put a turtleneck sweater under her dress, and one of the sopranos wore ear muffs. The other alto and I had down jackets, which we wore as we walked along and then cast onto the ground before singing. There was a lot of talk about how we would all make woolen capes before we did it again.

Oddly enough, we did not have the krum horns. The director brought a couple to rehearsal last week. They look like umbrella handles and sound rather like a kazoo. Or, as one of the sopranos put it, “I could bring my cat and we could step on her.” Perhaps the director was disheartened by our reactions, including the silent bafflement when he attempted to give us the pitch with the krumhorn.

But they would have been perfect for singing outside amid the cotton candy sellers, dogs, and children waiting for Santa Claus to roar up on a fire engine.

I was reminded of a year when we went to the lighting at a nearby town where Santa arrives by horse-drawn carriage. He was dressed in robes like Father Christmas, and he walked past me where I stood with my two little girls, holding baby #1 son, and stopped to touch the baby’s face. It was a magical moment.

Santa on a fire truck, with no little children in tow, before Thanksgiving has even arrived, is not magical to me, so I did not stay for it. Instead, I trooped off with the rest of the singers to the church where we had done all our lacing up, collected my car, and was home in time for dinner.

  Here is rachelsent’s theory about cell phones, complete with photos. I bet she’s right.

Rachelsent has also been posting her craft area mess, so I will do the same: here is the soldering stuff, waiting for me to get back to it. My boys have suggested that the dinner table is not the best spot for this, but it is the only good surface right next to a window, so it will have to be there. However, I hope to finish my soldered gifts today, and then I will put it away for the nonce and we can have our dinner table back.

And here are the completed front and back of #2 son’s sweater, being knitted in Wool of the Andes “Mist” on #6 needles, using the set-in sleeve calculations from The Knitter’s Handy Book of Sweaters.

I plan to get on with the sleeves today, too, after I have soldered for a while and before I head out into the cold to sing madrigals.

However, I am having a slow start today. I got up with my husband at 4:00 a.m., but then went back to bed since I didn’t have to get the boys off to school, and slept till 7:00. I suppose I must be more rested, but actually I just feel muzzy.

So I am trying to wake up properly as I pay the bills and clean the refrigerator and other such tasks, prior to doing the required Saturday errands.

And it is the aforementioned muzziness, I am sure, that is causing me to spend quite a bit of time debating about the free turkey grocery shopping question.

Here’s the thing: a local grocery will give you a free turkey if you spend $100 there. Now, I do spend $100 on groceries most weeks, but not all in the same place. I normally go to the farmers market, the health food store, the meat market, and perhaps the bakery, and finish up with the grocery store for things that weren’t to be had at those other places. Since I have a turkey in my freezer at this moment (given by my husband’s company) and my dad will be bringing over another turkey on Thursday, the offer of a 10-pound turkey which would otherwise cost about six bucks shouldn’t really be that tempting. It won’t even be a Butterball turkey, though they are grown locally, but some odd imported frozen turkey which I probably would never buy.

And yet, I also have to go this morning to the craft store, the post office, and the place where #2 son got all excited about the stocking stuffers. And still get home in time to solder and knit before the lighting ceremony on the square. So there would be some sense to the idea of doing all the grocery shopping in one place.

Once the tea kicks in, I should be able to make this weighty decision and get the day begun.

 Although it has been very busy here, with rehearsals and holiday preparations and whatnot, I have been doing some knitting. #2 son doesn’t nag as much as #1 son did when I was working on his sweater, but he does express polite concern from time to time. “You’ve only used a third of the rolls of yarn,” he’ll say with an expression appropriate for enquiries into the health of a loved one.

I plan to get in a lot of knitting time this weekend, since my musical commitment has lessened.

If you click here, you will find instructions on how to make your own circular needles. If you have weed whacker trimmer line (surely not — but that is how I remember the name of the stuff) and dowels and plumber’s tape and a drill and some sanding tools and an assortment of X-acto knives and whatnot on hand, you can do it in 15 minutes. 

I don’t think it would be easy for me to make standard-sized needles, or even consistently-sized ones, and I tend to need several needles for each project, so I don’t think this would work for me. But if you had the skills, then I suppose you could have a completely personal set of needles exactly as you want them.

In other knitting news, I bought a knitting magazine. I am surprised that I did, because I almost never buy knitting magazines. Once a year or less. For one thing, you can buy a book for the price of one knitting magazine nowadays, and I would usually rather have a book. It is also unfortunately true that most knitting magazines contain patterns which are either very like the ones I already own (or can calculate myself) or completely bizarre. Factor in the ads and the basic knitting info almost every current magazine seems to include, and you aren’t getting your money’s worth.

But this magazine — Vogue Knitting’s Holiday issue — contains a really lovely little jacket with texture stitches and a shawl collar. It comes in three sizes, to fit bust measurements 28, 31, and 35.

Excuse me? My size 0 daughters would take the largest size of this jacket. Many children would feel constricted in the smallest size. A 28″ bust? If this model has a 28″ bust, then she must have about a 20″ waist, and we know models must be 5’7″ or taller. This would explain why she looks as though she is about to keel over from fatigue or perhaps bad temper. I thought it was just an unfortunate choice of makeup.

Never mind. There is also a handsome Aran tunic. It starts at 40″. A tunic can have a fair amount of ease, of course; you can wear it a bit oversized. This model probably has quite a bit of it resting on the bench behind her.

Still. The average American woman has a bust size of 36 to 38 inches, and she can’t fit either of  these two patterns.

Although those were the two patterns I liked in this issue, I did scope the others out, and found that the sizes range from that 28″ girl to 51″, so most everyone could make something from this magazine. But you can’t just pick a pattern from the photo section and plan to make it without a bit of luck or a good deal of math. I guess the moral is: look and see what size the pattern comes in before you buy the instructions.

Or polish up your math.

Interweave Knits is the magazine being widely discussed among the knitting bloggers. Click on the name and you can see pictures of the designs. There are a couple of really pretty ones — the Nantucket Jacket, the Pewter Coat, and the Equestrian Blazer all appealed to me. There are the ones that are completely normal sweaters, socks, mittens, hats, and stoles, such as you already have patterns for on your bookshelf. There are the peculiar ones — the Rambling Rose cardigan seems to be the one everyone loves to hate, but don’t miss the B&D pullover and the entry for World’s Ugliest Headband.

I won’t be buying it; I’ve got my knitting magazine for the year.

“Guys freak out when you do things like that…”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do about Daddy…”

“I just needed to show the clerk his credit card to check in, you know, I wasn’t going to use it…”

“Maybe she’s threatening to quit to try to get leverage…”

“The doctor says it would be okay, but he still says he doesn’t feel up to it…”

These are not conversations I have been involved in. They are just a random sampling of the things I hear all day long as people stroll around the store with phones attached to their ears.

Some of them actually have the phones attached to their ears. I assume that this is convenient and comfortable, but it makes the users look not merely like Star Trek fans, but like delusional Star Trek fans, walking around talking to themselves.It also makes it impossible to tell when they are talking to me. They frequently look right at me and hold conversations about things in the store.

“Dinosaur Matching cards,” they say, making eye contact with me, “for ages 4 and up.” 

Then it hits me that they are reading the box to someone.

I am not sure what they want me to do, unless it is to stand respectfully waiting until they are actually ready to speak to me, but I ignore these people entirely. I do not want to hear their conversations, and I do not intend to play guessing games. One of them yesterday said “Here!” in the middle of a discussion of what kind of food to have at her party, and probably was talking to me at that moment, but I ignored her anyway. I couldn’t be certain, after all.

However, people often come up to the desk with the things they want to buy, never faltering for a moment in their phone conversations. When it first began, The Empress and I discussed what to do, and decided that it was the equivalent of the customer’s being in a phone booth. We waited till they were off their phones before we greeted them or spoke with them in any way. But now I think 40% of our customers are on the phone at any given time, and many do not relinquish the phone the whole time they are in the store, including checking out. I do not make eye contact with them, since they are having a phone conversation after all, but I give them their total and take their money. I used to try to wait for a break in the conversation, as though they were talking to someone who was present, but now I just say what I have to say and if they don’t hear it, it is their fault. Listening for a stopping point feels like eavesdropping.

“She’s coming to the wedding, but I am not going to speak to her. She did things with my husband that she shouldn’t have done…”

“I’m calling about the job opening?”

“Our credit score turned out to be a lot better than I thought it was going to be…”

I am not sure why this sort of thing seems so much more rude on cell phones.

Girlfriends shopping together often share private information. People have conversations while checking out, or break off in the middle of a conversation with  a friend in order to ask about construction paper. Customers tell me the details of their kids’ school problems so I can help them find materials to work on the problems, and those conversations are private. It isn’t that I think the rules of interaction in a store are the same as the rules at a cocktail party.

But it isn’t just me. The coffee house a couple of doors down has signs on the desk: “We will serve you when you finish your phone call.” My book club meets there, the place is perfect for assignations and heart-to-hearts, no one objects to talking, but talking on the cell phone is over the line.

Chanthaboune thinks it is because people on cell phones don’t lower their voices. They blithely shout out the details of their surgery or their affairs, whereas they would moderate their tone if they were talking to someone in the room. It may also be that a lone person speaking gets an automatic “Is she talking to me?” response, and doing that over and over during the day gets tiresome.

Or it may be that we need a new set of rules for interacting with people who keep their phones pressed to their heads at all times.

The Madrigal Dinners have been canceled. Instead, we will be singing at the lighting ceremony on the square.

I love the lights on the square, and it should be fun, like caroling, though we can expect to freeze our — well, actually, Renaissance costume will accommodate long underwear, so our bottoms should be okay. Shoulders are another matter. If it is not so cold that we end up with excessive vibrato, it could be a perfect beginning to the holidays.

I have had on my desk for about a week a survey from the local college. It is about biofuels. I started off well enough with the true/false philosophical questions:

“It is worthless for the individual consumer to do anything about pollution.” “When I buy products, I try to consider how my use of them will affect the environment and other consumers.” “Each consumer’s behavior can have a positive affect on society by purchasing products sold by socially responsible companies.”

A little iffy on the syntax there, but easy to answer.

But then there were questions like “What kind of raw materials do you think are converted to biofuels right now?” There was no spot for “I have no idea.” And “Do you think current processing of raw materials… is environmentally friendly? occurs in rural areas creating rural jobs? is done on a small scale to benefit small business?”

I don’t know. Having just read about the environmental costs of growing corn in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I  mark “Disagree” fairly confidently on the question of whether biofuel production produces more energy than it uses in the process of production. But we aren’t a corn-growing state particularly any more. Soybeans are more our thing, and rice. The Omnivore’s Dilemma hasn’t said much about soybeans yet. I know they are made into crayons (we sell them in our store). Maybe soybeans are used for fuel. If it were just corn, would the local university be into it?

I realize that it is a survey, not a test, and I will not be getting points for correct answers, and move on.

We are back to philosophical issues. “The so-called ‘ecological crisis’ facing humankind has been greatly exaggerated.” “Plants and animals have as much right as humans to exist.” “The balance of nature is strong enough to cope with the impacts of modern industrial nations.”

I am reminded of Stephen Jay Gould’s remarks on the whole concept of “saving the earth.” It was a great marketing ploy, he said, but the earth will be fine no matter what we do. We may bring about our own extinction and the end of the age of mammals, but the earth won’t care.

I’ve gotten distracted again. I return my attention to the survey. It is no wonder it is taking me so long.

Now we are supposed to rank the factors that would affect our fuel choices.

As far as I know, we have no fuel choices. I can buy gasoline, and people with diesel engines can buy diesel, and I think that is it around here. No one has ever offered me ethanol or restaurant grease fuel or any other choices, including “Other (please describe).” But there are a lot of factors listed on the survey, and I am supposed to say how they would affect my choice if I had one. Do I want fuel that reduces agricultural surplus? Does it matter how it smells? Certainly I want to make the least negative impact on the world food supply, but what is this “produced in the agricultural sector”? Who else could produce fuel made from soybeans or switch grass? Where is the agricultural sector? Some of the factories that make food and feed are pretty smelly. Is that what they are talking about?

I keep having to close the survey and think about it.

I make it through the questions about what I personally would do if fuel costs keep rising. But now there is a section asking “which option is more important to you?” The choices are things like “import biofuels vs. protect domestic biofuels industry from foreign competition.” I didn’t even know we had a domestic biofuels industry. Is it in the agricultural sector? Do they deserve protection?

And they want to know if I am more in favor of importing biofuels from politically stable countries or buying the cheapest biofuels. What is a politically stable country? Saudi Arabia? A stable dictatorship might have cheaper oils than a country going through upheavals, but should we hold it against countries that have a little instability? What are they talking about anyway?

I leave that part blank.

Now I am supposed to choose between rising fuel prices and lessening food prices, or rising food prices and lessening fuel prices. That seems like an unlikely choice. When fuel prices rise, food prices do too. Are we saying that using organic domestic waste in our cars would make milk prices go up? Or would restaurant grease be a more expensive fuel option? Would it depend on the kind of restaurant?

Hmm. Agree or disagree, “The government may not interfere with this.” Is the government interfering with biofuels? Maybe when we get the oil men out of the White House they’ll quit. The next government might be all for the agricultural sector and creating rural jobs. Or totally opposed to restaurant grease in cars, particularly if it turns out to be smelly. We might even have a government that is concerned about the environment. Would we really want the government to be unconcerned about fuel?

Oh, well. I finished the survey. I am going to mail it in today. Be watching for headlines that say, “Average American startlingly ignorant on the subject of biofuels.”

The lights are an example of conspicuous consumption of energy, of course, but they have a positive economic impact on our region, bringing in the tourists and whatnot. Perhaps we could run them off of restaurant grease.

Selphiras wrote a thoughtful review of Skipping Christmas last year. Click on the word “review” to read it — though she does give you the whole plot, so you may want to wait till you’ve read it yourself.

The thing that surprised me in the review was that this book had been recommended to her as an example of frugality.

The Kranks (the Christmas skippers in the book) are not frugal. Frugality is not even the point of the book, though Grisham does devote a couple of pages to enumeration of the things that made up the startling $6,100 they spent on the previous year’s celebration. But they refuse to do things that are free (welcoming carolers, decorating with items they already own, attending the company holiday dinner) and instead do other things that are costly (tanning booths, buying cruise gear they do not intend to wear). In fact, since Luther Krank uses his company’s time and paper to prepare announcements that he will not be celebrating, he is not even showing fiscal responsibility or honesty in general, let alone actual frugality at Christmas.

If you were looking for a book that made a good point about frugal living and the holidays, Skipping Christmas would not be it. Try How the Grinch Stole Christmas — not the Jim Carey movie, which got the whole thing backwards, but the original from Dr. Seuss.

“It came without packages, boxes, or bags!… Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before: Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”

I’m quoting this from memory, having read the book or watched the TV cartoon version every single year of my life, so I may have a word wrong, but the point is there.

Another option would be The Hundred Dollar Holiday. This excellent little book points out that our Christmas customs date from a time when a feast, a party, a bunch of noise and company, and store-bought trinkets were rarities. Now, the rare and special things are quiet, peacefulness, free time, and handmade things. Author Bill McKibben proposes that we change our celebrations to reflect the change in our society.

Unplug the Christmas Machine would be another good choice. Online resources include the Society to Curtail Outrageous and Ostentatious Gift Exchange, Alternatives for Simple Living, and Buy-nothing Christmas.

I love Christmas, myself, and would never want to skip it. But I do see a lot of people who are miserable at the holidays for one reason or another. People get overwhelmed, overextended, and overstressed.

Frugality and simplicity at Christmas fortunately doesn’t require skipping the holiday. It takes resistance to peer pressure and media pressure, and it takes advance preparation, if only a conversation with the people you celebrate with to determine what parts of the celebration are the most important.

I’ve had that conversation with my kids every year since they were old enough to understand the question, and sometimes I’ve been surprised. Going to see the lights on the square and the annual shopping-for-siblings trip have both been listed as the most important thing in the past. Presents are important to children — they do not have the resources to buy those things for themselves, after all — but they don’t have to be the center of the holiday.

The cost, time crunch, and stress of the holidays are the main complaints from those who suffer at this time of year, but they are not inevitable. A budget and a calendar can help. A sense of perspective can, too. We are not really going to be beset with attack carolers, but there is a lot of pressure to match last year, or the celebrations of our friends, or even what we see in the magazines (the HGP recommends avoiding all holiday issues of magazines for just this reason). I have been stressed out at Christmas myself, in years past, though I don’t have that problem any more.

But there are other sources of holiday unhappiness that sometimes get mixed up with those things.

One is unhappiness about the people we spend our holidays with. The Kranks have a long Christmas card list, but they don’t seem to have anyone they actually want to see at the holidays, except their daughter. Sometimes the Stage 3 shoppers (the unhappy, stressed ones we see in mid-December) can’t keep themselves from talking about how they dislike or disapprove of the kids they are buying toys for, or their parents.

We don’t get issued a new set of family or friends for the holidays. If they are not perfect the rest of the year, they aren’t going to turn into the ones we see in magazines on Thanksgiving day. And the ones in the magazines aren’t really perfect, either. They just get paid to look that way for a few seconds while the picture is snapped.

So I have one more holiday book to recommend: The Perfect Thanksgiving by Eileen Spinelli. This is the story of two families. One has perfect food for Thanksgiving, and a peaceful meal followed by long walks and chess games. The other has mess and crisis and down-market amusements. Where holiday magazines would tell us that the first family is perfect and the second is imperfect — and lots of “don’t feel guilty” columns would tell us that the second is the perfect one because it is somehow more authentic — this children’s book says that both, and indeed all, families are just fine the way they are. And I think that would be true even if your holiday family is you and your friends, or you and your cat, or just you.

That “just you” is the other holiday problem. I remember the only really sad Christmas I ever had: the first year that I couldn’t be with my family for the holidays. I was pretty sorry for myself, as I recall. Fortunately, by the next year I had decided for myself what Christmas traditions I wanted, and I was able to enjoy them by myself or with friends, even though I couldn’t be with my family. Since then, my holidays have been — in the sense in which Eileen Spinelli means it — perfect.

And if it isn’t perfect, it cannot be made perfect by buying the things the perfect magazine family is modeling.

Our anthem yesterday was Handel’s “Hallelujah Amen,” which you can hear, if you like, by clicking the link. I was having trouble with the count at the page turn — and I was not the only one. I wrote out the count and tried really hard to do it correctly, but the ladies on either side of me were doing it differently — differently from me and from each other, so I don’t know which of us was right. It is possible that this gave the song a couple of additional parts and an intriguing fugue-like quality, or perhaps a psychotic fugue quality. However, since the Oldest Member was having to sing the tenor part all by himself, I feel confident that we were not the worst thing about the piece.

Sometimes you have to feel sorry for the congregation.

Apart from that, I had a pleasant day with the family.

Oh, pleasant apart from the quarrel I had with #1 son. The cause of the quarrel was not important, and it wasn’t much of a quarrel, but we are not a quarrelsome family, so it was upsetting. Can I use that as an excuse for the very bad pictures I am posting here?

#2 daughter, to whom I told the whole story since she called in the middle of it (and #1 son really hates that, especially if he hasn’t been able to get in with his version first) pointed out that the boy is 17, so I should be glad he isn’t trying to bring about Armageddon single-handedly, or smoking behind the barn or something. Raising his voice to me and saying “frickin’” is not that bad.

The completed madrigal costume can be seen, more or less, at left.

It actually looks pretty good on. I may need assistance lacing the thing up.

We know that it was only relatively recently that women were able to dress themselves without assistance, and I suppose that must have seemed like the whole point of having sisters, for those women who did not have maidservants, but surely modern costumes should be designed so that a woman can get into them herself.

We are in a new venue this year, but I suppose there will be a women’s changing room, and the usual chains of lacing — a soprano lacing up an alto who is lacing up another soprano.

The alternative is to have your husband lace you up at home and drive over in costume. However, one year Fine Soprano did that and her car stalled on a hill on the way and the police stopped to assist her and there she was in her costume. The director that year had insisted on cleavage, too.

She hasn’t quite recovered from the embarrassment yet.

#2 son’s sweater, with the back completed and the front up to the armscye.

I am using a gauge of 4.5 stitches to the inch, and feeling that it might have been better at a smaller gauge, but it certainly is going quickly at this one.

The very cool vintage buttons for the now nearly completed SWAP jacket. I don’t think you can see them, actually, but this was the best I could do. They have a beaded metal edge around some sort of smoky translucent plastic.

Like many old plastics, they are unfamiliar enough that they do not register as plastic. They seem to be a shell of some kind, though I feel sure that they are actually plastic. “Casa de Leon Extravaganza” is what their card said.

Someday I will arrange for buttonholes on this jacket and be able to wear it, but until then it is still in the running for “slowest garment in North America.” However, I did hem the sleeves and sew on the buttons, so that was progress.

To complete my display of really bad photos, I offer you Sunday dinner. Lasagna and Key Lime Pie with meringue, with the central trivet waiting for the hot vegetable to arrive. Reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma persuaded me that there were worse things than a meal composed of real foods that contained cane sugar and cheese, so the boys got a lavish high-fat meal. I continue to be amazed by The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I have mostly stopped reading out bits, because #2 son told me frankly that he doesn’t care about agribusiness, but I would strongly recommend this book.

The author, Michael Pollan, wrote The Botany of Desire, another book which I greatly enjoyed. He has some very interesting things to say about evolution and the relationships between humans and plants, a topic I don’t often think about on my own.

I also read Skipping Christmas by John Grisham. I saw the movie last year, and felt that it didn’t do justice to the rather interesting premise involved, so when I saw the book at frugalreader I requested it. The book doesn’t really do justice to the concept either. At the risk of sounding sexist, I have to wonder whether the male prespective was a problem. Grisham came up with unlikely things like vindictive carolers, rather than the disappointment and hurt feelings one might expect from family members, anger among people who felt they had to take over the work the skippers usually did, and so on. It also seemed odd to me that the Xmas-skippers continued to do a lot of shopping and so forth, while refusing to do effortless things like listening to carols or attending church services (they were regular church-goers in both the book and the movie, so it was not an extra task for Christmas). In fact, all that they identifiably failed to do was 1) decorate their house (which the neighbors offered to do for them), 2) give and attend a couple of parties, and 3) send Christmas cards. Since they replaced these tasks with tanning, arranging for a cruise, going on a diet, and spending enormous amounts of time explaining themselves to others, it is hard to see how they benefitted.

It did seem like the right thing to read while not making Christmas presents, though. #2 son has informed me that he wants to wear his new sweater for Christmas, so it must be finished by then, but it cannot be considered a present, since he is watching me make it. However, I did address Christmas cards, and order prints to put in them. I do not usually send pictures in the Christmas cards (and you will not wonder at that, considering the quality of my pictures) but this year I have a current photo of all the kids together, including Son-in-law, and this is rare enough that I want to take advantage of it.

Today I must drive over to the campus with #1 son’s scholarship applications and application fee, things which I fear will have to go to various different offices, and to the eye doctor for contact solution for the boys. I hope still to make it to the gym. And, unless fairies took care of it for me over the weekend, I will have the math and language arts areas to take down and put up at work. This leaves little room for surprises today, which may be a good thing.

I knitted up a third skein of Wool of the Andes yesterday, completing the back of #2 son’s sweater (shown here disporting itself in the bushes — well, really, I am trying to make it look more interesting) and about a third of the front.

While doing this, I finished reading a novel and began reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a book which has been on my to-read list for months. It is fascinating, combining science, history, economics, politics, and current events in one entertaining package. It is not light reading, having as it does a lot of numbers on the pages, but it is worth the effort.

I kept reading out bits to the guys, who were watching our local football team trounce the neighboring state’s team. Apparently, we are well on our way to becoming national champions this year, so the guys’ reaction to my announcements about corn, agribusiness, and how exactly they get steers from 80 to 1100 pounds in one year were received with limited attention.

Actually, I tried to limit my announcements to times when nothing much was going on, and they tried to respond well. There would be a “Huh? what?” moment, and then my sons would add some interesting related tidbit from their APEcon or Plant Science classes.

I also got a good bit of fragrance crafting done. Today I must work on my madrigal dinner costume and I hope to get to either the partly-finished jacket or the soldering. However, #2 son keeps asking “Are you working on my sweater?” and of course knitting fits best with reading before the fire.