Winter Windows

It’s almost the winter solstice, which means that the days have almost reached their shortest, and will soon be getting longer again. The limited amount of daylight has seriously cut into the amount of food posts I have been interested in doing. I’ve been making lots of yummy winter foods, like veggie pot pie, and mushroom stroganoff, and some not-so-wintery but still delicious bison tacos with pear coleslaw and homemade corn tortillas. But with such limited opportunities for daylight photography of these dishes, they just end up looking all blurry and unappetizing. I simply can’t bear to post a recipe if the photo doesn’t look as good as the food tastes. I hate unappetizing photos of food.

Our Christmas cactus blooming right on time.

However, this being our first winter in our current house, I am really appreciating the winter light that we do have as it streams in our south facing windows (our previous abode had no south facing windows). In the summer our south-facing yard is completely overshadowed by an enormous tree, which is a blessing in the heat. Now all the leaves have fallen and the sun shines into our house from morning to late afternoon before it sets. The angled rays of winter sunshine sneak right in to the delight of all our house plants that have been growing and blooming quite happily. It makes the house feel so warm and bright.

Our meyer lemon tree is flowering! The blossoms smell spectacular. RRTT has been playing honey bee and pollinating them with a paint brush in the hopes that we might get some little lemons!

When the sun goes down and we settle in for the long night again I find myself craving warm light and colour. As a result I have been taken with something that could be described as Christmas mania. For the first time ever I have actually felt a bit concerned that we may have too many Christmas lights up inside the house. I am the sort of person who has white Christmas lights up inside all year round (instead of lamps) for their warm cozy glow. I feel like I can get away with it with the clear ones, they’re not TOO festive? I did have a roommate admit to me once that he hated them and thought they were cheezy. But it obviously didn’t cut too deep because we still have them all over the place. And now we have more. Coloured ones as well. Not the LED ones, the “old-fashioned” ones. Currently we have 8 strings with 100 bulbs each. That’s 800 little Christmas lights in less than 500 sq ft. My excuse is that we can’t put them up outside because we don’t have any outdoor plugs.

Christmas mania is also manifesting in an overwhelming need to “craft.” I have all sorts of little craft projects that I’ve been working on night and day. Most of them I will refrain from posting about here because they are destined as Christmas presents for potential readers of this very blog. But I will show some of the “craft carnage” that is now permanently set up on our kitchen table.

Dishy came over last week and brought some crafty paper ideas. We cut and glued and drank tea and ate little lemon cream fairy cakes and some purple veggie soup (purple cabbage…so tasty but so purple). There was some origami attempted…and some origami flung in frustration. I opted for the simpler task of making some construction paper bunting. It started with the word “LOVE.” I thought and thought about what word to put on the other window…JOY? PEACE? Nothing seemed quite true to our window. So I finally settled on LOVE YOU, which is something more of a sentence rather than just words. Is it weird? I don’t know. I like it. I tried not to get too Christmassy with it, in part because I wanted it to represent the winter solstice and in part because I think I secretly want to keep it up ALL YEAR LONG with all my Christmas lights. So we have a sun and a moon and two trees.

So next post will be a recipe for my little honey lemon cream butterfly cakes. And perhaps some photos of our Christmas tree. Which we covertly DUG UP and is now sitting in a pot of soil drooping under the weight of all the Christmas lights. So yes, perhaps a post about how to kidnap a tree, dress it up for Christmas, have it as a house guest for the holidays and then politely replant it in the forest.