It has been a rather odd sort of Christmas, this year. It’s the first time for either of us that we’ve spent Christmas just the two of us, with nowhere that we had to be, and nothing that we had to do. Normally we’d be off at some sort of family gathering, but this year, it was just the two of us. On the one hand, it meant we had an entire day of (potential) sloth to look forward to; on the other, it meant that all the traditional stuff just wasn’t going to happen.

The day started, as a nontraditional sort of Christmas should, with apple pie for breakfast. This past fall, while up at Apple Hill, we picked up a quartet of fat little apple pies from one of the farms. Technically they’re supposed to be single serving pies, but they’re so huge that we normally split them, and even then they’re a bit much. So when talking about what we wanted to do for Christmas, we remembered about the apple pies in the freezer, and…pie it was.

While the pie was baking, we opened our stockings. I’ve got a short stack of new books to read, and a little bag of dark chocolate squares to savor, and the Cute Overload page-a-day calendar to bring in to work to look at every time I need a bit of cheer. And I scored major wife points by tucking tickets to a Jonathon Coulton concert into Richard’s stocking.

The cats, of course, could not care less about what day it is, or whether there is an sort of holiday to celebrate. However, Christmas is a great excuse to toss tissue paper on the floor, sprinkle it liberally with catnip, and then sit back and laugh hysterically at the chaos that ensues. There’s going to be a nightmare of a mess of shredded tissue paper and catnip to clean up later, but right now, the house full of doped up, happy cats makes it all worth it.

I did a little bit of reading of one of my new books, but then I decided to knit, and I’ve been toying with the idea of making us some kitchen towels because all our existing kitchen towels are old and faded and getting a bit ragged. So I poked around online until I found a promising pattern, and dug a stack of chocolate brown cotton out of the stash, and then settled myself onto the sofa with my yarn and my needles and a handful of cats, and commenced with the knitting. Three hours later, the first kitchen towel was done. Sometimes there are perks to being a really fast knitter.

This afternoon Richard helped me pick all the remaining lemons off the tree in the back yard, as well as more than half a dozen of the ruby red grapefruit, since I think they might finally be ripe (I’m really not quite sure how to tell without cutting them open). I made grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, and we snacked on the veggie tray I made sure to pick up at the grocery store Tuesday afternoon on the way home from the office. We watched a sequel to Frosty the Snowman (one of Richard’s stocking stuffers from his family) which was truly horrible in its badness until we decided to come up with our own dark ending, and nefarious motive for all the characters. We went to the next door neighbor’s open house gathering, and spent some time chatting and laughing with various people from our street. I even went to the coffee shop because there had been some other knitters who were making noises about coming out for our weekly Thursday knitting group, even on Christmas, but finally left early because it turned out I was the only one who showed. And when I came home I juiced all the lemons and boiled all the peels in preparation for making another (massive) batch of candied lemon peel, before sitting back down on the sofa, yarn and needles in hand and cats in lap, to finish up the second kitchen towel, just because I was on a roll.

So overall, even though it’s been a very nontraditional sort of Christmas, with not a single traditional food eaten (or even, for that matter, prepared), and even though it didn’t exactly end up being a complete day of sloth as planned (I blame this on the fact that I am still having way too much fun cooking in my shiny new kitchen of joy), it’s still been a lovely sort of Christmas to have, just this once.

Tis the season for Holidailies