There’s something about wood that just makes Christmas feel more real to me. Not the plastic, not the tinsel — the wood. The warmth of it, the texture, the way it smells when you’re working with it in a heated…
I never thought I’d become someone who makes things to sell at Christmas. For years I was strictly a maker-for-fun — crafts spread across the kitchen table, the girls covered in paint, Tasos pretending not to notice the mess. But…
There’s something about a well-dressed window box in winter that stops me in my tracks every single time. I remember walking through our neighborhood last December with my daughters Maria and Marina kept pointing at every house with greenery spilling…
We made our first cardboard gingerbread house because Maria refused to make a real one. She was seven, and she had decided — firmly, with the kind of certainty children have about things that don’t matter very much — that…
Gnomes arrived in our house uninvited. That sounds more dramatic than it is. What happened was that Zina gave Maria a small felt one she’d found somewhere, and Maria put it on the bookshelf, and then the following year Marina…
I have a shelf in the living room that I started calling the December shelf sometime around Maria’s seventh Christmas. Every year, somewhere in the first week of December, I start putting things on it. Some of them I’ve made,…
The tree skirt is the one thing I kept putting off every year. I’d spend real time on the ornaments, the ribbon, the lights. Then I’d get to the base and think ”I’ll figure that out later”. Later would arrive…
I used to think flocked trees were a bit much. Every time I saw one in a shop or online, it looked like a snow machine had gone off and nobody stopped it in time. Not for me, I thought.…
Marina discovered The Nightmare Before Christmas when she was six. She sat completely still through the whole film, which is not a thing Marina does, and at the end she said: I want my room to look like that. We…
Ribbon is the single thing that separates a Christmas tree that looks designed from one that looks assembled. It is also the thing that most people attempt, abandon halfway through in frustration, and quietly remove before anyone sees it. The…
