On a whim, we went to the coast yesterday. Mr. G’s parents have a little beach house south of Lincoln City, an unassuming and somewhat mildewy little pre-fab that shudders when the washer goes on spin cycle and will someday be demolished and replaced with a sturdy and charming cottage, but a beach house nonetheless, nicely nestled on an estuary teeming with grebes, buffleheads, herons, and gulls of every stripe. Mr. G was feeling knocked about after a presentation he felt he flubbed, and I had two days off in trade for working this weekend, so we packed up the dog and a change of underwear and off we went. We got a late start, but there was light enough when we arrived to cross the footbridge and tramp over the dune to see the wild waves.

Our tough Texas pup found the ocean quite alarmingly vast, noisy, and wet. She treated us to an operatic account of her concerns, with brief intermissions to chase irresistible shreds of blowing foam. Not even a cuddle could convince her we weren’t all in mortal peril.

(Look how big she’s grown!) Once the sea was out of sight, she was her happy inquisitive self again, and we had a quiet evening of knitting, working, and snoozing by a smoky fire that snorted at Mr. G’s boyscout smarts and required near constant stoking. I’ve been knitting this mitten:

I had a hankering for some colorwork, so last Sunday I decided to cast on and reverse-engineer this mitten from a picture in this fabulous coffee-table book of Norwegian mittens that was floating around at the yarn shop last year. The book was – you guessed it – written entirely in Norwegian, which I cannot read. Not a problem, as the book is plum stuffed with thorough charts. But as luck would have it, I fell for the design on a pair for which there was no pattern. Here’s what I know about them: “Mannsvott fra Sør-Trøndelag, Trøndelag Folkemuseum, Sverresborg FTT 28549. Vottene er strikket av Bjørg Sliper fra Trondheim, til hennes svigerfar i 1946.” I’m guessing that means they’re men’s mittens from a place called Trøndelag (which I have no idea how to pronounce), and maybe the knitter was named Bjørg Sliper, and they were either knit or donated to the Folkemuseum in 1946. Maybe some of you readers can help me out here? Anyway, I was drawn to the beautiful sprigs of berries on the cuff, and to the semi-botanical design on the back of the mitten. (Terri Shea refers to those windmills of foliage as pine boughs in her excellent Selbuvotter; I don’t recognize the other elements, but I haven’t read the book cover-to-cover yet. The next pair of (equally beautiful) mittens on the page in the Norwegian book is from Selbu and uses the same berry sprigs.) And wait until you see the thumbs!

Yes, that’s a jar of Swedish cloudberry preserves modeling my mitten cuff – a cuff which was influenced by the advice of a certain Estonian, I might add – and the colors are non-traditional, and the yarn is woolen-spun Shetland, not a proper worsted Norwegian wool. This is not a strict recreation of an authentic mitten. A girl just needs a good pair of overmitts to wear to the dog park and a chance to indulge her mitten fetish, you know? But this girl also likes nerdy knitting history, so if you know anything about these patterns I’d love to hear it!

Drifting Pleats scarf: winging its way across the country.

Christmas in Tallinn stocking: blocking in the tub.

Two pairs of No-Frills Fingerless Mitts: one wrapped and delivered; one awaiting a little fix on a thumb. (Okay, by “little fix” I mean an acceptance that I really did run out of yarn five rounds shy on the last of the four mitts, and that the giftee won’t mind if I substitute a different but related color rather than buying another skein of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Worsted, and that I know perfectly well that using a mismatched yarn is a better idea than clipping off all the extra inches on all the tails and trying to join them together in a yarn I can’t spit splice.) I’m pretty sure neither of those recipients is interested in knitting enough to read here, so I’ll risk a picture or three:

(No-Frills Mitts from The Knitting Man(ual), fingerless iteration. LLSW colorway: Baltic Sea – one of my favorites. Prop Master: Mr. Garter. Black and white shot included for extra manliness.) I was only planning to make one pair, and even that was an eleventh-hour addition to the knitting roster when I realized it was my friend Linus’s birthday and he needed some cheering up to offset the sad demise of his ancient VW van and his motorbike in the same week. But they went so fast! And they’re so manly! They’re too big for Mr. G, but all the same he kept borrowing that first pair: a clear sign that a handknit is a winner.

Bias Garter Hat the Second: on the needles as of last night.

Tomtenish Zimmermann slippers: one to be unsewn and made slightly longer; the second requiring three episodes of The West Wing (I never get tired of watching the first three seasons and pining after the fake government of my dreams), or maybe the first disc of Pride and Prejudice.

Stealth husband knit, not to be named: drying in a most interesting manner involving a hammer and the dehumidifier in the stock room at Knit/Purl, the only place I could be sure he wouldn’t open a closet door and find it. And I had my doubts about doubled worsted really drying in a closet anyway.

Today my parents and their dog and my Christmas tree all drive down together from the island, my brother and his lady fly in from New York, and then the flurry of holiday visits and cooking and baking and singing and rumpusing begins in earnest. I’ve been downloading every cookie recipe recommended on every blog I read. I’ve plotted my early morning assault on the grocery store for supplies. I’ve swept up the carpet of wood splinters all over the house that used to be our firewood before the dog moved in. (The remaining kindling looks like it’s been worked over by drunken ineffectual beavers, but I figure it will burn as well as ever on Christmas Eve.) So for now, I’ll leave you with a short list of dorky Christmas facts about me, as long as you promise to reply in kind in the comments.

1. By the age of three, I could sing all the verses of the little-known carol “The Snow Lay on the Ground,” complete with Latin chorus. (I’m not sure I remember all of them today.)

2. I also know the French version of “O Holy Night.” And I’ll maintain that it’s more beautiful in French.

3. My family doesn’t believe in simply barber-poling the lights around the tree like everyone else. We prefer to spend forty-five minutes cantilevered off a stepladder, anally outlining prominent branches in a pleasing architectural manner. For this reason, we also prefer the quirky misshapen natural trees over the carefully molded bottle-brush varieties available commercially.

4. We didn’t leave cookies out for Santa. Because even fictional people ought to adhere to a nutritious diet of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. He usually got a couple of satsuma oranges. And he always took time to write a thank-you note.

5. It feels a lot more like Christmas Eve if we read aloud Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. My dad does it really well.

6. No presents are opened until everyone is equipped with a pad of paper and a writing implement with which to log their booty and the folks to be thanked for it.

7. We carefully fold up and reuse our wrapping paper. Seriously, some of the sturdier sheets in the useful sizes have probably served six or eight seasons, plus birthdays if they aren’t overtly holiday themed. Needless to say, we frown mightily upon the wanton use of Scotch tape. It was a matter of family awe and pride that my late grandfather could wrap a present with no tape at all, just precision folding and well-judged ribbon placement. Legendary skills, I’m telling you. He’d also make sure everyone was issued a thoroughly antiquated but perfectly maintained pocket knife to slit any unavoidable tape with minimal marring of the paper. There was also this doctrine about using the oils from the sides of your nose as the best possible conditioner for knife blades, but I digress (and di-gross). Anyway, I like to think that I come by my oddities honestly.

Okay, your turn. Show me the dorky holiday traditions and quirks. I know you’ve got ’em.

The other night I dragged myself up to bed, feeling good about the progress I had just made on the Christmas knitting. There was the husband, all tucked in, reading about the financial situation at Singapore investment firms. (Yeah, it would put me to sleep, too.) I noticed he looked vaguely guilty. There was a studied air to his casual flipping of the pages. Then the blanket wriggled and I realized why:

Discipline has clearly gone to the dogs. And I have been supplanted. He denies it, but I swear he said, “Come on, girlfriend,” to the dog when he took her outside last evening.

Nobody here looks pleased with himself.

(And don’t worry, responsible pet owners. We don’t actually let her sleep with us. This was a one-time, invitation only, special privilege thing.)

I spit on the notion of Christmas beginning directly after Halloween, or directly after Thanksgiving. The Overlords of American Commerce can beset me with carols and tinsel and leering snowmen and corpulent Santas; I shall resist. I shall not turn my thoughts towards Christmas until the proper month has arrived, except to think about knitting presents. I also want to see some snow before I really begin to feel that the holidays are around the corner. And so it felt auspicious when I staggered out into the grey morning with the little dog on the first day of December and a few lonesome flakes were swirling down. The apple tree was full of chickadees, and their little calls to each other seemed tender and solicitous: the snow is coming, are you warm? Are there bugs on your branch? I filled the bird feeder with sunflower seeds for them. Later came purple finches and juncos and jays and sparrows, but I knew I’d have to carve chickadees for this year’s linoleum block. Later, I strung lights on the front porch amongst my Japanese fish kites, and then I brewed up a gallon of spiced cider and spiked it with many glugs of Jim Beam for a little birthday shindig we had for Mr. G. (He’s 30 now. Shhhh. He’s also ironing my white collared shirt for a Shibui modeling gig right this moment. Yes, I have the finest husband in the land.)

Seriously, try the hot toddies. They’re so delicious they could be habit forming. Just the thing for rain or snow or whatever part of the nation-wide storm system you’re experiencing right now. And definitely the thing to get into the holiday spirit.