Fiber Fool

Despite the weather causing worry about the holiday it was one of the best in recent memory. The drive was uneventful other than it being very difficult o drive overnight when the night is so darn long. I don’t think we’ll try that tactic again in the winter.

We got to Pipestone, MN just before sunrise on the morning of the 23rd. We were both fighting sleepiness so we stopped off at their McDonald’s so I could have some breakfast and coffee, then DH took over the rest of the driving. Just as we were out of town I realized that everything had a thick coat of ice on it and that the low angle of the winter sunrise made everything sparkle just so. So, we pulled into a terribly icy wayside rest (rest area for non-Interstate highways) and I capture what I could as best as I could. It was lucky timing as soon the sun had risen high enough to be behind clouds and the magic sparkle disappeared.

I’m putting the rest of this behind a cut because it is kind of lengthy. You can see all the photos and get a shorter version of the story at the MN Christmas 2006 set on Flickr.

Tomorrow I think I’ll be peppering the blog with some reviews of the year in few different categories. This is more for my benefit so I apologize in advance if you are not interested in that and give you fair warning.

We rolled into Willmar and arrived at grandma’s house (now mom and dad’s rental property that is as yet unrented because the estate has been paying them rent so my aunt could keep some of her stuff there while she goes through a divorce) around 10:30am local time. It was tough walking into grandma’s nearly empty house. Everywhere I turned there were memories popping out – the sewing machine I first sewed on, the stool I sat on when I learned to cut rhubarb, grandma leaning out her bedroom window telling us we needed hot chocolate because we had been sledding on her hill for much too long, her scent lurking in closets, the fake log and fire thing I fixed when grandpa gave me the only compliment I remember getting from him (“not bad for a girl”, in reference to the soldering job that fixed it). It was sad to see the house so stripped down and empty. So, the first twenty minutes or so were rather rough. But it made for a convenient place to stay since it is just across the gravel road from the farm and my parent’s place.

We were wiped out when we arrived and had talked of catching a nap after unloading the car and then doing a late lunch with everyone in town at Persepolis, but we decided we weren’t sure we’d be able to do just a nap so we stayed up and walked around the farm while I took photos of the ice and dusting of snow on various things. We then went to bed at 6:30 that night, LOL! I got up for several hours in the middle of the night and knit and watch the first DVD of Quicy, ME. Then I caught another few hours before our day began.

We met grandma and grandpa Bakke at the newer of the Chinese restaurants in town, Golden Palace. They were so excited that the place served vegetarian food. It was kind of cute and very nice that they were concerned about that. The food was pretty good. We then ran a few last minute errands – picking up take-n-bake pizza for the evening meal, getting a cable for plugging my iPod into the car stereo as we had forgotten the adapter, and seeing if they had DVD Clue in stock yet.

We went home, visited for a bit and went to the Christmas Eve service in Svea. Afterwards we brought Emma over to mom and dad’s and we had a good time watching her play with Gaston’s toys (they are plush and squeaky and she doesn’t get plush toys because she destroys them too quickly). My sister unfortunately taught her to take them from the toy box. Previously you could put things on the hearth that were hers and she wouldn’t take them, knowing they were “up” and not to be played with right then.

We ate pizza and then we played Mad Gab. I discovered Mad Gab is really difficult if you are only in teams of 2 because you don’t get to separate yourself from the words printed on the card and just listen to someone else say them. The original plan was to go to my sisters that evening and have our big dinner and open gifts, but with church at 5pm and my mom nearing the end of antibiotics for bronchitis we decided to move those activities to the 26th. It was a nice Christmas Eve though to just get to relax. And, pizza on Christmas Eve is one of Drew’s family traditions so that was kind of fun too.

Christmas morning my sister and I went to Christmas in the Barn at a fell church member’s farm not too far away. It was a full barn – with people. But we were greeted with two horses, half a dozen goats, a dozen sheep, and a couple of dogs. It is an informal sort of service – just carol singing, a living nativity by some Sunday school kids, the reading of the Christmas story and communion. I wish I had brought my camera to that as some of those kids were big hams. One of the wisemen was playing his gift (a star shaped gift box all decorated) like a drum, and one angel sang at the top of her lungs.

We then went into town to my grandparents where we had our traditional Spam bun meal. Yes, that is right – Spam. It gets worse, the filling in the buns is Velveeta, Spam and onions run through a good processor or meat grinder. The buns then go into a 350 degree oven for 7-10 minutes until toasty and the spread is melted. Along with this we had two Jello salads (poor grandma, we kept her in the dark that Jello isn’t vegetarian and brought one of our own salads and just hope she didn’t notice Drew not taking the other salads), a tray of pickles and olives, deviled eggs, my Mediterranean orzo salad (which DH made while my sister and I were at the barn), potato chips (because there wasn’t already enough salt and preservatives in the buns, LOL). DH made himself some grilled cheese sandwiches in place of the Spam buns. It all tasted soooo good as it had been sooo long since I had had most of those things. We also tried a liqueur from South Africa, Amarula, which my mom had given my grandparents. They called it Elephant wine, but it is made from some unusual berry the Elephants like I guess and there is an Elephant on the label. It was a lot like a sweet and peppery Irish cream.

From grandma and grandpa’s we headed south again and made a quick stop at the farm to feed Emma and leave her home and then went over to my aunt and uncle’s house which was my second home growing up. There was copious food as there always is at Schueler gatherings. Different from my last Schueler family Christmas was the lack of a gift exchange and the addition of game playing. I feel a little guilty feeling this way, but it was the BEST Schueler Christmas Ever. We still did the traditional reading of the Christmas story and singing of some carols and then it was a lot of visiting, eating, laughter, and game playing. My cousin Andrea’s husband, Ray taught us a new game called Famous People that was quite fun. We shall have to share it with our game playing friends!

The morning of the 26th we were on our own, so DH and I went to this great Scandinavian shop in downtown Willmar, House of Jacobs to get a few things. Their lefse was the lefse I grew up on and it is so much better than what they have in all the grocery stores here. But we already had lefse, we bought two new stars for our windows (wooden this time), a dishtowel with a Dala horse on it, and a 2007 Swedish calendar. I think we spent well over an hour there combing through all their Scandinavian products. They had kitchy things that made fun of lutefisk and “uff-da” but they also had Dala horses, the straw ornaments, cookbooks, china patterns, flatware, tomten, and much more. Just being in the shop was sooo happy making! I’m glad we got to bring a little bit of it home with us.

When we got back DH and I tagged teamed making omlettes for lunch then we were back into town. My grandmother has been going through her stuff trying to pair down. I think it was spurned by watching everyone take care of Grandma Irma’s stuff. Anyway she had her basement set up like a tag sale and told us to take whatever we wanted. My sister to one thing and we had a huge blox plus two smaller Amazon boxes of stuff. Of course we’re into retro stuff so there was a lot of our problem. But we came home with some great stuff – a lazy Susan with seven bowls that fit on it in shades of green, a gorgeous decanter and glass set, some wine glasses, a great decorator glass coffee carafe, the old Yahtzee that has a padded cup and which I had written all over the inside of the lid “Kristi was here.” Oh, I also got a bunch of wool yarn, though it is needlepoint wool so they are in skeins of 15 – 14 yds and some of them had been cut into 1-yd lengths. But the yarn had been my mom’s before her eyesight had gotten bad. I think some of it will turn into some colorwork or striped charity hats. I’ll likely want to line them as needlepoint wool isn’t very soft. But the colors were too great to pass up! I’ll save some of these things for future Eye Candy Fridays.

That evening we gorged ourselves on pasta and grandma’s garlic toast. My sister made a special sauce for DH and the rest of us had my mom’s sauce. Man, I had forgotten how good her spaghetti sauce is. I need to request that we make that more often when I go home. I also need to make grandma’s garlic toast more often. It is kind of like rusks or croutons with garlic and parmesan. I think I’ve made them once, but we’ll have to remember them the next time we do an antipasto night or other big Italian dinner.

Then it was on to opening the gifts. There was a lot of the usual joking that goes on with my family. Dad gave my sister a gift that my mom wanted nothing to do with so mom added an “only” to the tag. We teased mom about her post-it note gift tags, but it makes the most sense because someone can tag the items with the post-it and then when she wraps it she can put the same post-it on the bottom of the box so no one gets the wrong gift (which has been known to happen once or twice a year). When my mom opened a new ruby earring and necklace set it was a silver setting so my sister claimed it (we decided long ago that when mom goes I get the gold jewelry and Amber gets the silver) so I told dad next time he needed to buy gold, LOL! Grandma started to cry when they opened the DVD/VCR combo we got them. My sister hammed it up when she got a bunch of chapstick. I ran around in sock monkey PJs and slippers that my sister gave me. Mom snorted when she got her frying pan. It was even funnier because I guess she had just been telling dad that Christmas was much better now that it was no longer a frying pan Christmas. I guess that means she got the joke, LOL!

Due to the next storm that was to roll into Colorado we took off on our originally scheduled day even though we arrived a day later than planned. But it was good to get back before the snow hit.

We will be headed to Colorado Springs tomorrow to do a belated holiday with DH’s family, though we’ll be without his parents. The delay in getting their truck back and the weather has dictated that they best head to Texas and across to Arizona instead so that they make it in time for their cruise. Fortunately SIL3 is willing to make the drive so we will get to be passengers this time around!