December | 2010 | I live on a farm ...

The Advent of Santa

December 17, 2010 at 3:56 pm | Posted in knitting | 7 Comments
Tags: country living, family, friends, home, inspiration, knitting, Life, marriage, personal, photography, Photos, relationships, thoughts, travel, Upstate New York, women

Today I show you 17 Santas from my collection … Christmas is drawing quite near indeed. It snowed again, lightly, this morning and things are looking very lovely outside our many windows. My favorite sight is looking outside the dining room windows and seeing the barn in the snow.

It looks most Christmasey to me, for some reason.

Santa, Day 16 is one my husband purchased for me in the Adirondack mountains, at the Adirondack museum, on a fall vacation we took a couple of years ago.

This Santa also reminds us of our cottage and our times in the canoe there, on the river … treasured memories accumulating in our marriage of nearly five years.

Santa Day 17 is one we bought on the same trip, up in a little gift shop in Clayton, up in the Thousand Islands. He is a fisherman Santa and we bought him to honor my brother, Dan, who passed away the year before my husband and I met and married. Dan loved fishing, and when I saw this Santa I knew he had to be in my collection. When I look at the smile on his face, I think of Dan and his love of both fishing and Christmas.

Now on to some business … I have used a random number generator to select the ten free pattern winners for this week.

Five winners from the comments left on my previous post are:

Sue, Robin, Lisa, Leslie, and Elizabeth. I have your email addresses from the comments, so I will send an email to each of you asking for your knitting pattern choice and get it off to you a little later today.

Then, there are five from those who left comments at my Treasury at Etsy:

2vintagedivas, tchvalentine, Candycej, SJKass, tdeane

I will contact this group of winners via convos as Etsy.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this comment driven contest. The feedback you left regarding my son’s new Etsy store were very helpful and encouraging to him. I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to look through his products and say a little something about what you thought.

Hope you all have a beautiful day today and enjoy your own advent … what ever the nature of it may be.

~firefly

The Advent of Santa: Days 7 through 15

December 15, 2010 at 7:31 pm | Posted in art, Christmas, country life, country living, faith, family, Holidays, humor, knitting, Life, love, marriage, photography, relationships, Santa Claus, September 11, shopping | 22 Comments
Tags: art, children, culture, family, home, inspiration, Life, love, personal, photography, Photos, relationships, Upstate New York, women

My Advent of Santa continues, though I slipped up for several days in a row. I do that with advent calenders every time I attempt to follow them. I start out with the most sincere intentions that this will be the year when I finally follow the advent every single day. Inevitably I reach some critical point in the holiday season when the advent calendar is missed first one day, then another, and then several in a row as I focus my attention on completing various Christmas projects.

Without further explanation, I offer you the following assortment of Santas, nine in a row for today (see how bad I am). All but the two really little Santas are from my children, given to me as they moved through their teenage years into early adulthood. They are especially dear to me, of course. These Santas reflect my their personalities, sense of humor, and the close bond we have.

This is one of the tiny ones, which I bought for myself I think at a Joann’s Fabric store many years ago.

This one they bought for me Christmas 2001, after September 11th. They chose him because he is a Fireman Santa.

Another of the tiny ones I bought for myself.

They gave me this one the year before I moved to New York.

This is the first Santa they ever bought me, back when they were still kids.

A bobble-head Santa they bought me the year I moved to New York.

A Boyd’s Bears Santa they bought me because I love and collect Boyds Bears.

This one they gave me because he is goofy, and sometimes I am as well.

Happy Holidays!

~firefly

The Bus Stops Here

December 14, 2010 at 6:35 am | Posted in art, baby, Christmas, country life, faith, family, food, gifts, Holidays, Life, love, pets, photography, relationships, Santa Claus, shopping, travel | 5 Comments
Tags: art, country living, family, friends, home, inspiration, love, personal, photography, thoughts, women

I was up very late this evening and into the wee hour (1:00 is just one wee hour and I went to bed right after this post which I did at 1:10 a.m. or so, so yes, singular “wee” hour) of the morning. There is a book project I am working on and there was a long, long wait while files uploaded and re-uploaded. While I waited I dreamed I was on a shopping trip in the city on a bus. In my dream I got off at each bus stop and shopped at the store right in front of the stop.

Of course, my bus was virtual and in a waking dream and so my shopping was on Etsy. I created a Treasury so I could show you what I was up to; titled it, “The Bus Stops Here.”

Hope you enjoy my dream.

And, by the way, if you are paying attention … I really am going to finish my Advent of Santa. You know how it goes with advent calendars sometimes …