Happy New Year!
Month: December 2010
2010: A Knitting Year In Pictures
What did your 2010 look like? Happy New Year everyone!
Merry Christmas!
I hope your Christmas is full of fun, fibery goodies, and sweet treats! Merry Christmas to all!
Winter Solstice Eclipse
In case, like me, you weren’t able to catch the solstice eclipse due to weather (or the fact that it was in the middle of the night), here is a great time lapse movie of the eclipse in its entirety. Really amazing stuff.
9 ways to have a happy, secular, Christmas
I didn’t mean for my last post to sound as if I didn’t care for Christmas at all. In fact, I love Christmas. It’s my favorite time of year, the best holiday by far. But when you shout “keep Christ in Christmas!” you’re talking about MY Christmas too, and frankly, MY Christmas has never had much Christ in it to begin with, seeing as how I was raised as an atheist, and I don’t really need Christ in my Christmas for it to be a wonderful, joyous time. I have many wonderful, happy memories of Christmases past and the season is imbued with deep and rich meaning for me. Christ doesn’t figure into it at all. I look forward to Christmas with child-like wonder and anticipation every single year. Yes Virginia, it is possible to have a meaningful Christmas without Christ. And you can too.
- Deck the halls: the practice of putting up greenery and other decorations in the winter has a long long history, so go crazy! Get a tree and a wreath and some roping for the stairs. Bring greens to every corner of your home!
- Have a holiday party/feast: thousands of years ago, the winter solstice was the last chance until spring for good eating. Aren’t we lucky to live during a time in in human history that very few people have to worry about starving to death before food starts growing again in the spring?
- Play Santa: exchanging gifts is a long standing tradition and was a part of most ancient (and not so ancient) mid-winter celebrations .
- Light Candles (and put up lights): the days leading up to the winter solstice are the darkest days of the season. Put up some lights to ward off the darkness.
- Go Caroling/enjoy some secular (or not) holiday music. So many wonderful songs abound this time of year! For non-church going folk it’s our big chance spread Christmas cheer by singing loudly for all to hear!
- Speaking of which, watch holiday movies. There are many wonderful old and new holiday classics, most available from Netflix (or wherever your at-home movies come from).
- Go to NYC and see the sites.
- Bake cookies. Cookies are awesome. Also, pie.
- View Christmas through a child’s eyes. The holidays are a magical time of year. Something about the lights and the cold weather and the delicious anticipation makes this holiday the most special of them all. And yes, some people find that meaning in the story of the birth of Christ. But it doesn’t have to be that way for everybody. Sometimes you don’t need a reason for the season.
Go, secular humanists! Go forth! Make meaning in this season for yourselves. Because Christmas belongs to you too.
Merry Christmas!
Humbug!
Dear Christians,
Here’s the thing. Christmas doesn’t really belong to you. At least not in its entirety. And the fact of the matter is that it never really has. Human beings have celebrated Midwinter festivals in one form or another for thousands of years. The many layers of tradition, folklore, and celebration of our modern Christmas have been handed down to us through hundreds of generations of human history and are not limited to a single storied birth which very likely didn’t even occur near the winter solstice, if it occurred at all.
Christmas, as much a secular holiday as a sacred one, belongs to everyone. I’m terribly sorry that you don’t care very much for sharing your sacred holiday with the unwashed heathen masses, but it doesn’t change the fact that you DO share it. Further, the secularization of Christmas doesn’t make it any less sacred. Celebrate a sacred holy Christmas in your places of worship and stop lashing out in annoyance at those whose celebration is more secular. Keep Christmas in your own way, and I’ll keep it in mine.
Hat Trick
I finished 3 hats this week! (See what I did there?)
[ravelry]
A Santa Hat for E5 with a MONSTER pom pom. Note to self, FunFur makes for very messy pom poms.
[ravelry]
A very manly hat for my father-in-law.
[ravelry]
And, nearly 1 year after casting it on, I finished the fish hat I cast on for E5. Well, mostly. It still needs eyes, but it’s close enough for government work. How has your week been?
Zombie Attack!
Last year, my NaNoWriMo book was a really terrible zombie novel which ends with the utter destruction of the city of White Plains, NY by nuclear fire. Zombies are everywhere (figuratively) nowadays, you may have noticed, and ever since we started watching The Walking Dead, I have had the occasion of interesting, but not wholly frightening, zombie apocalypse dreams. This morning, our house was about to be overrun, and I was trying to evacuate Doozer and Lolly by stuffing them into sacks. Lolly got away and was immediately consumed by the shambling undead hoard. Trufax.
If only we lived on the SS Huckleberry.
When did knitter become synonymous with ninja?
I mean honestly? Today on the weather channel I listened to an exchange between the two anchors about the extremely long weather delays today at the New York airports. “So don’t forget to grab a good book or some knitting!” the first anchor said, to which the other anchor replied “is knitting even *allowed* in airports?”
Really?
When has a terrorist EVER taken down a plane with his or her knitting implements? I mean, I can’t even think of an instance of this happening in *fiction*. Is there a secret cadre of knitting ninjas out there that I am not aware of?
Knitting Interrupted 
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