With the twelfth day of Christmas officially drawing the holidays to a close, what say we blog a few more gifts?

Back in November I got a lovely letter from a dear friend in New York. She reads here and I don’t want to embarrass her, but she’s been one of the chief mentors of my life and a true kindred spirit. The sort of person you name a child for. No children other than the four-leggedies in the offing here, so I thought I’d better knit her something in the mean time. She mentioned wanting to knit “a really wow-y scarf” and asked for a pattern recommendation. So I knit her a wow-y scarf so she’d have something to warm her neck against the vicious Upper West Side winds, and sent her a copy of the book it came from. I present Drifting Pleats, from Lynne Barr’s clever Knitting New Scarves:

This is The Fibre Company’s Terra in the color Sorrel. Three skeins is exactly the right amount for this pattern – there were only a couple of yards left at the end. I can’t praise this yarn enough. It feels wonderful in the hank, but it’s even better when you’re knitting with it. It’s plump and lustrous with silk, but soft with baby alpaca and conversational with merino. Do you know what I mean? Some yarns feel so interactive, as if they’re having an invigorating discussion with your fingers. Anyway, I couldn’t get enough. And this pattern is such a kick that I found an excuse to drift some more pleats right away.

This color is Redwood. I blame these three skeins for pushing me into my love affair with the cinnabar color that left me helpless to resist that bulky wool I showed you last post. This scarf is now finished — bound off last night and just awaiting some end-weaving and a couple of blasts of steam — and almost ready to leave for its new home. This one is a commission from a friend who wanted a unique, handmade gift for his lady love. I’m a sucker for sentiment like that (and I may have a certain weakness for kind-hearted and extremely handsome men who can bunny-hop the cyclocross barriers), so I told him he could reimburse me for the yarn and we’d call it good. After all, knitting with this yarn is its own reward.

Know what? The year is only six days old, and already I’m seeing a trend emerge. 2008 is going to be about the appreciation of special yarns. 2007 was, in many ways, about patterns — mostly the designing of them. But most of those efforts began with the idea for the garment, and I co-opted whatever yarn seemed like it might suit. But my new projects are beginning with the desire to transform a beautiful yarn into its ideal knitted shape. It’s a subtle difference, but a whole new challenge. There will still be plenty of design happening at Blue Garter. I should be able to show you my Shibui sweater and socks very soon, and I’ve got a new pair of socks on the needles for them for this autumn. And one of these days I’ll properly blog the dainty little Jo Sharp Aran Tweed sweater-in-progress I’m calling Victoria, the pattern for which will be available here eventually. My sketchbook is fat with more ideas. But I’m going to try this year to give some of the special yarns in my stash the attention they deserve. And that, my friends, is as close to a New Year’s resolution as I intend to come.

It’s no secret that I love wool. Bring me your Shetland, your Cormo, your Wensleydale yearning to breathe free. Wool is warmth, comfort, tradition, balm. My favorite soothing music? Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” from Cantata No. 208.

I see a lot of wool in my job at the yarn store (and in my closet at home, for that matter). I don’t get jaded about it — I still pet my favorites and fuss over arranging them in their tidy towers. I carry them to the natural light by the door to better admire their beauty and surreptitiously sniff them when the customers aren’t watching. And still, once in a while, a new woolen yarn comes along and knocks me arse over teakettle. It was love at first sight with the Garthenor Organic Blue-Faced Leicester, and love all over again a few milliseconds later when I cradled a plump ball of it in my two hands. Months passed, and still it haunted my dreams. I leaked it through the appropriate channels that I would not be at all averse to receiving some under the Christmas tree. And lo, five fat sheepy angels of the Lord descended!

Pure and minimally processed from the good sheep of Wales, my friends. This is honest wool, earnest wool quivering to serve the appreciative knitter. It’s woolen spun, soft and lofty, beautiful in being not quite perfectly even, in the way that your loved-ones’ faces are not quite perfectly symmetrical. The stitches link arms companionably and hold firm and trusty, each proudly taking its place in the knitted fabric before you’ve even slipped it off the needle. I love this wool.

It likes a 3.25mm needle, the dear little pet. And it deserves a whole fine-gauge sweater that I’ll wear for the next sixty years until I’m dribbling my soup down the front in the nursing home. Although I sometimes balk at knitting the Project of the Moment, Tangled Yoke might just be classic enough for it.

I have no doubt that every stitch of this precious stuff will be gratifying. In fact, stop me if I contemplate ripping out the completed sweater so I can knit it again, okay? But in case I get the urge to knit something to wear now, like, oh, say, Brooklyn Tweed’s scrumptious new EZ cardigan, and since I always feel I need to support the yarn shop in my wee hometown, I picked up this:

Chuckanut Bay Bulky Perendale wool from New Zealand. I’ve got 660 yards, which means I’m seriously flirting with a shortage if I try to bang out a slim-fitting feminine version of Jared’s cardi. It was all the shop had in this luscious cinnabar, my new favorite color. I decided to live dangerously. You’ve got to burn the candle at both ends while you’re still young, right? (On a wild tangent, I feel it’s my duty to remind you all that yon tired cliché is from a brilliant Millay poem: My candle burns at both ends / It will not last the night / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends / It gives a lovely light!)

Next time, more luscious cinnabar. It’s time to show you not one, but 1.25 Drifting Pleats scarves!

Christmas Chez Garter was jolly, heralded by rumpusing canines, much cookie baking (I went with these recipes in the end), and cute cousins in StarWars hats:

Yes, even too-small StarWars Hat the First made an appearance on a smaller head! Pardon the bleached appearance of this picture – something unfortunate happened to the reds in the transfer to the web. Rest assured that my cousins are healthy and beautiful boys, and are not kept in a damp cave pining for sunlight.

Presents were exchanged. (Much coveted Blue Faced Leicester wool was received. I shall endeavor to show you in the next few days, as I don’t think I can resist knitting a swatch right away.) In the midst of the unwrappings, I glanced out the window and — mirabile dictu! — it was snowing. Great fleecy flakes were fairly cascading out of the heavens. I had to stare in stupid wonder for a minute to be sure I wasn’t imagining them before I shot out of my chair shrieking like any six-year-old. It didn’t stick, but it felt like a benediction.

And the handknits were a hit. But does anyone else suffer acute camnesia when racing to finish holiday knits? I seem to have a terminal case. Marika’s Christmas in Tallinn stocking came out beautifully, but I did not take a picture. Asa loved his Elizabeth Zimmermann garter-stitch slippers from Knitting Without Tears (knit in chunky-weight wool on 5.0mm needles for a kid’s size 7 – they’d be a perfect accessory to go with a Tomten or Baby Surprise Jacket, by the way), exclaiming happily, “These are my ice skates!” and sliding all over the hardwood floors. But they were captured only by chance, and quite unrecognizably, in the corner of the picture above. I made another bias garter hat for my neighbor, this time in ShibuiKnits Merino Kid in Rapids and Colinette Parisienne in Castagna, but I did not photograph it before I gave it to her.

Since I have no pictures, I offer instead my Christmas dinner recipe for vegetarian Yorkshire pudding. We went to Britain when I was thirteen to visit the great-aunts and see the sights. Dining mostly in pubs, my brother and I subsisted largely on pasties and Yorkshire pudding. (Also there was this drink I loved. I believe it was made of lemon and barley water. One day I’ll find it again.) Having been vegetarian these twelve years past, I’ve never tried to cook any of it. I recently decided that a mushroom reduction could stand in pretty well for the roast beef drippings, so on the 25th I followed this recipe for the pudding (I couldn’t resist a name like Ishbel), using butter for the fat, and Marika and I improvised the following:

In plenty of butter, sautee 1 1/2 lbs. chopped mushrooms, mixed portobello and button. Add a splash of red wine as the mushrooms begin to cook down. Throw in some finely chopped herbs – we used fresh thyme and rosemary. Stir a little cornstarch into half a cup of hot water or broth to dissolve, then add another half cup of broth or milk. Pour the lot in with the cooking mushrooms to thicken up the juices. Cook until you like the consistency. If you haven’t used a commercial vegetable or mushroom broth, you’ll probably want to add a little salt. Spoon over squares of the pudding and eat it hot.

You could make the whole thing vegan by using oil or vegetable shortening in the pudding, and then oil in the mushrooms. It would be just as tasty.

I’m up at my old island home now, editing reports for school and writing thank-you notes and a New Year’s letter and knitting and dog-wrangling. I’ve finally picked up the cashmere stole again – only five months until the wedding! – and worked most of a chart repetition last night while watching Ratatouille and a couple of West Wing episodes from Season 2. And there’s another Drifting Pleats scarf on the needles, commissioned by a friend for his lady love. Pictures soon, I promise!

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.