_Well... yikes. When it seems as though people holding a grudge against you are lurking around, waiting to give you a hard time, it's surprisingly difficult to think of anything decent to blog about.

But blog I shall. Because that's what I do.

With less than a week until Christmas, I'm starting to feel the pressure a bit.

Christmas is not my favourite holiday. It can be enjoyable, and if you're a little kid, it's great, but for someone like me (hello, social anxiety) it's a hard one.

If I could spend it at home having quiet time, I'm sure I'd love it, but inevitably, we spend it driving around the city from event to event, stuffing ourselves with rich food, making endless small talk, and feeling vaguely uncomfortable in our holiday outfits. Inevitably I feel a bit sick and overwhelmed by the whole thing.

My general coping mechanism is to keep things as simple as possible. With that in mind, we're aiming to do even less this year (visit only one location on Christmas day, for example). I'm also sticking to my usual rule about gifts, which is that each item has to be either handmade or less than $20. (So basically, I buy books, I make things, and I shop at Ten Thousand Villages.)

We managed to get our tree up this past week, which was a hilarious gong show of me agreeing to let Nathan place the decorations, and then suppressing my obsessive compulsive desire to shout, "Not there! Not there!" over and over again.

We also got a chance to sort our ornaments and I ended up filling an entire bag for Goodwill with cast-offs. Basically, we unloaded all the B-listers: baubles that were gifts from people we don't particularly like, and the cheap-o plastic ones from my old life that are imbued with bad juju. As a result, the tree is a little more bare than usual, but it feels good to see it hung only with things that really make me happy. (For example, the funny little Abaca Leaf mouse that Nathan got me last year. So cute. Ten Thousand Villages!)

_And anyway, now I have an excuse to MAKE MORE CRAFTS. I'm obsessed.

Speaking of which, I'm determined to try a bit of higher level crafting over the holidays, since I'm going to have a bit of time off work. The project I most want to tackle is this adorable chipmunk toy:

That chipmunk is made from that glove! Amazing, right? The project was designed by Miyako Kanamori for her book, Happy Gloves: Charming Softy Friends Made from Colorful Gloves and the instructions for this particular little guy were featured a few years back on the Etsy blog. I've never had the confidence to try it before, but my crafting has been improving lately, so I think I might be ready. If I end up trying it, I'll post about it on the Chic blog (obvs.)

Nothing else is new, really. Or nothing I feel comfortable writing about until the lurkers get bored and go away. But fear not! I'll get thinking about more emo posts for the new year, I promise. (I know that's what you love, you voyeurs, you.)