A Hobbit Christmas Part One

Every year my family and I choose a theme for our Christmas. Sometimes we go all out, decorating and choosing gifts around that theme. Other years we'll just get an ornament to commemorate that year. This year we are having a hobbit Christmas. I think this is about the most fun I've had preparing for Christmas. From what I know of hobbits, they are simple folk, they love to stay close to home, they eat a lot, and the live in holes in the ground.

Decorations
We decorated with more natural things this year. We have a real tree which we strung with strings of cranberries and cinnamon sticks. We put pine cones everywhere. We hung garlands everywhere and the whole house smells like cedar. On the table, we put a white candle surrounded by a wreath of cranberries and of course more pine cones. We had two special visitors this year. A miniature Gandalf and Bilbo stand in respectful admiration by the nativity. We also put swords and plastic dragon miniatures on all the remaining surfaces.

Gift Wrap
We purchased wrapping paper in rustic neutral colors and interspersed them with packages wrapped in brown paper. I made bows for the gifts out of an old book. Then I made gift tags by tea staining printing paper. I then get the paper into pieces and stained the edges very 70's style. After burning, I rinsed each piece so that we wouldn't get ash on the gifts. Once they dried, I wrote a hobbit quote on each one in my best hobbit handwriting. Each member of the family took a which-lord-of-the-ring-character-are-you personality quiz, and we used those names to address the gifts.

Ornaments
I painted a ceramic ornament with a green hobbit door on one side and the following quote on the other side: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Advent Calendar
For the advent calendar, I didn't want to do gifts or candy. So for each day of December, I planned a riddle. Since there aren't enough riddles in the Hobbit to have one each day, I had to find a few extras from elsewhere. Then I found a 750 piece puzzle with a dragon on it. I divided the puzzle into 25 parts so we would open 30 pieces each day. On the back of the section of the puzzle I wrote the answer to that day's riddle.Each set of puzzle pieces and riddle went in a box wrapped in brown paper, commemorative of the gifts Gandalf brought. Then each package was marked with a date.

i don't want to reveal all the hobbit things I've planned for Christmas yet. So I will write a continue this later.

Lost...in books

I was introduced to Lost at the end of its first season. My parents (who never watch TV shows) set up the computer with the TV because the parents (who never download anything) had downloaded every Lost episode off of iTunes. And they proceeded to watch me watch Lost. I watched the first episode with an eyebrow raised. By the fifth episode I was hooked.

And for the next 6 years, like everyone else, I kept coming back to it--because of the questions, because of the numbers, because of the name calling, because of the flashbacks, because of imaginary peanut butter and songs about the sea, because Sayid is really hot.

I almost gave up on the show a couple of times. Like after the first flash forward when I knew they got off the island, when we got gypped half our episodes in season four, when Charlie died, when in season five, I had more questions than in season one, when we pulled out an atlas and based on the flight plan of 815 and the size of the small plane carrying drugs, tried to locate the island and found it impossible, when the logic just plain didn't work, when they completely ignored and left Walt's character unfinished, unanswered.

But I stuck with it through the finale. Yeah--about the finally. I loved it and I hated it. The Jack/Locke fight on the cliffs in the rain on a shaking, sinking island simultaneous with Locke's operation was very cool. The quality of love being the very thing that triggered everyone's memories of the island was an interesting concept.  Hurley had some great scenes, love the spectrum of his character. There were lots of edge of the seat moments and lots of questions answered--finally. Basically everything the finale needed to be...until the last 10 minutes. They presented the whole dead thing and I was silently screaming No, no no!! That was the conclusion I had reached somewhere mid 3rd season. What if they're all dead, if they all died in the crash. And I spent the rest of the show hoping they would find a different way to end it. My biggest problem in the theory: You can't kill someone who is already dead. It makes every death we've mourned for nothing. Shepherd Sr.'s statement some died before and some after was key, but still, dead?

So Lost is over. Some people have written ballads of mourning and posted them on YouTube. I'll closing out these six years of "obsession?" a different way--with a reading challenge. I'm working my way through all the books Sawyer read during his six years on the island. Might give me an interesting perspective.

Random thoughts I don't have time to develop

Spring is cruel. All the trees are coming to life with yellowy-green leaves that get thicker every day. Pink blossoms cascading from branches and white poofy ones that look something like cotton candy. I've never been a huge fan of spring. It's muddy. But this place looks like something from a greeting card. And then there's my house with with 8 trees out front as bare as winter would have them. They are the only leafless trees on campus and have become quite depressing. But I will have my revenge. I went out last week and bought a half dozen potted plants. Now when I look out my window, or at my windowsill rather, I see green and feel a little less neglected by the season.

I bought Ocean's 12 and 13 recently because I found them on clearance and someone told me I would like them. I refused to watch them until I had seen Ocean's 11. I finally got around to watching it online this weekend. The Japanese subtitles were kind of annoying, but I couldn't find any other sites that were free.

I've been back from Maranatha for a week now. It was a fun weekend, and I've been meaning to put together a happy list from it, but life got busy again the moment I returned. I had a wonderful time talking to Miss Betsy, watching the Mormon Pride and Prejudice with Chelsie and RuthAnn, singing Head and Shoulders in my old 2's and 3's class, playing violin at Calvary, attending the play. I went to all my old haunts with a notebook and came up with some interesting thoughts which I will not record here. I guess it was weird being back just to visit. But I'm glad I went.

I met the sweetest lady last night. Her name is Irene. She's the kind of character I would write into a book, quaint and happy, talking a mile a minute with something good to say about everyone and everything. You know she must have had a bad day somewhere along way, but you would never hear about it. There was something about her that seemed more fictitious than real. Now my mind is actively trying to determine how many roles I could work her into.

I'm going to Sight and Sound this weekend. I can't wait. I'll try to post something about it.

Things I did this week that I've never done before:

• Bought a book I had never heard of just because it was on the New York Times bestseller list
• Watched an entire movie in Chinese, reading the English subtitles
• Made fried oreos
• Subscribed to receive dating tips via email and unsubscribed 10 minutes later because I thought it was stupid
• Set a picture of a total stranger as my desktop background
• Attempted to solve a Rubik's cube backwards to see if I could return the pieces to their original messed up locations (I'll never know if it worked)