Arctic Light

MY CHRISTMAS TREE IS BUDDING. This would explain the sneezing around these parts for the last week or so; I can only imagine the pollen that is currently circulating in the enclosed space of the house.



New needles! The dark needles are the old ones; the clumps of light needles at the ends of the branches with little semi-transparent coverings are how they grow new ones in the spring. I've never had a Christmas tree do this before, that I can recall.



Pollen cones. >:| I got it all over my sweater the other day and couldn't figure out where it had come from.



Must we though.

(Edit: the tree is a wild black spruce. I don't know why this has never happened before, since we usually do just what we did this year and cut one in the swamp behind the house. Maybe we just never harvested a large and mature enough tree for it to happen?)

I was idly looking through aviation-related ornaments on Amazon, as you do, and immediately oriented on this, which has now arrived in the mail.



IT'S EVEN GOT A TINY WINDSOCK THAT MOVES.

It's not *quite* in scale with the biplane I already have, but it's close enough to look nice, and it has a nice old-fashioned feeling that I really like.



A Christmas airplane diorama may be a necessity this year.

Everything from mid-August onward has been, in many ways, a pile of suck this year (though friends and fandom continue to be delightful; thank you, friends and fandom <3) and there is every reason to think that November and December will continue to be Not So Great, so I plan to fling myself wholeheartedly and perhaps obnoxiously into Christmas from Nov. 1 going forward.

I missed out on really doing anything at all for my other favorite holiday (Halloween) or getting to use my Halloween icons much at all, and as much as I completely get why people hate it, I unironically love most of the silly, kitschy, overdone Christmas trappings (sparkly lights! mall santas! gingerbread!), so this year I am putting the SEASON into Christmas season. I will ABSOLUTELY be putting up a tree before Thanksgiving, and I make no apologies. (In fact I plan to buy a fake tree for the first time ever, so that it's possible to leave it up for a month and a half without having it die the death of a thousand needles.) I may seek out new sources of Christmas icons, even. Actually if anyone can point me to some, I welcome them! It's fun for me, so I am going to throw some tinsel around the place.

I doubt if I'll be posting about it THAT much, honestly (Tumblr is more likely to take the brunt of this) but with a paid account you can filter out my "christmas" tag if the tinsel is too much!

The shortest day of the year! I posted some pictures at my realname blog.

New cards from goss, oracne, and silverflight8 (sealed with real sealing wax!!). They're lovely; thank you so much! ♥

WE STILL HAVE NOT DECORATED THE TREE. We set it up on Thursday. This is becoming a travesty. I plan to get some ornaments hung tonight. On the other hand, having a bare spruce tree obtained from our own place is kind of pleasantly pagan for the solstice, I guess?

Speaking of such things, I accidentally plotbunnied myself with the idea of Zemo as a Sokovian genius loci/spirit-of-place. It's just such an interestingly fitting idea and full of angsty possibilities having to do with the destruction of the country.

I also posted a TFATWS Christmas story featuring the usual suspects.

Further posts coming with end-of-year book roundups and the like!

Vintage cigarette Christmas ads from the 1950s sure are a thing. I fell down this rabbit hole after I came across one on Tumblr. There are just SO MANY and they're all like a freaky, Christmas-colored peek into another universe.

There's nothing like Santa smoking to make you feel like you've jumped to an alternate reality.

Give cigarettes to everyone you know!

The holiday cartons that look like boxes of candy are weirding me out.

Nothing says 'festive lung cancer' like a tree decorated with cigarettes!

"There is nothing under our tree but cigarettes and Jim says I'm not allowed to complain about it."

Enjoy more festive cigarettes here, here, and here, if you can handle that much holiday spirit.

ellenmillion and I are running a Facebook event this weekend, selling/auctioning off our remaining ornament inventory from the holiday craft bazaars. We'll be putting up new batches of ornaments throughout the weekend and offering giveaways and livestreaming. (Ellen is livestreaming an ornament painting demo even as I type this!)

Trim Your Tree Facebook event | Ellen's ornaments - batch 1 | My ornaments - batch 1

Individual ornament listings have prices and details. Starting bid amounts range from $2-10 US; Buy It Now prices range from $5-15 plus opportunities for special pricing on batches of ornaments. Ornaments can be personalized at no cost, and picked up for free in Fairbanks Alaska, or mailed to any U.S. address for a flat $5 fee for all ornaments (mine and Ellen's) that you buy this weekend! International shipping is at cost.

Most of my ornaments (and a few of Ellen's) are glass, and we haven't actually tried shipping them - at least, I haven't - but in the relatively unlikely event that ornaments do not arrive intact, I will of course refund or replace them at no cost.

We are running this event will run through Sunday noon Alaska time; all auctions will close at that time.

I think that after Christmas, I'm going to shut down the computer and go offline for a little while. I'm not quite sure how long -- at least a couple of days, I hope. I've been feeling terribly scattered and unproductive over the last few weeks, and while this obviously isn't a cure-all, I just feel like I need some mental stillness, away from the million and one distractions of the Internet. Even if I do nothing but lie on the bed and read books (hopefully I'll do a LITTLE more than that!) I think it'll help with this overstimulated, "can't concentrate on anything" feeling I've been having lately.

I also like the idea of doing it after Christmas, because for the last half-decade or so, ever since I started keeping track of my annual creative goals, the week between Christmas and New Year's has been a quiet, contemplative time -- when I declare a moratorium on finishing up anything I didn't manage to get done this year, and reflect on what I'm going to try to accomplish next year. Adding some offline time to the mix would, I think, suit the general tone of that time period very well.

When I asked for posting ideas (still taking requests if you like, in the understanding that I may not write all of these, or even most of these!) leesa_perrie asked about my favorite Christmas memory.

The interesting thing is that once I got to thinking about it, most of my really vivid Christmas memories are, uh, bad. I really like Christmas, I still get kind of excited about it, and I had the whole "big anticipation of Christmas!" thing as a kid, but I don't remember too many Christmases in enough detail to really talk about them.

I don't want it to sound like all my Christmases were miserable, because they truly weren't! Most of them were great! They just don't stand out all that much ... It's not really specific recollections so much as a lot of little memories of cutting Christmas trees in the woods, or shaking out our stockings by the wood stove in a cold house in the morning. Nothing that really stands out as a "best of" memory.

But then I thought, oh hey, what about 2008! This was one of the only Christmases that I really did anything as an adult. I spent most of December at my sister's place that year. She was living in a little rented mobile home trailer, but we bought a tree and a whole bunch of blue and silver decorations, and we dressed up the trailer beautifully, and cooked lots of tasty foods, and watched tons of stupid Christmas movies and TV shows. So yeah, I think that one is probably it. :D

Another of my really memorable Christmas memories from childhood also involves my sister, although I'm not sure if this would really count as a good memory, but it's one of those things that feels incredibly good once you've done it, I guess? We were around age 15 and 13, I guess, or 14 and 12 (we're 2 years apart), and had been left to watch the homestead by ourselves. Like I've mentioned in some other posts, I grew up in bush Alaska, and there weren't any roads. Our parents went into town to do Christmas shopping and got stuck there by a blizzard that dumped 2 feet of wet, heavy snow. The nearest place where you could land an airplane (small planes, on floats in the summer and skis in winter) was, and is, a few miles from the house. Two days before Christmas, we set out to break trail so that my mom and little brother could get home. (I can't remember if this included my dad as well. I seem to recall parents, plural, but that would make us even younger, and I don't think we were that small; I don't think they ever left us alone out there until I, as the oldest child, was in my early teens.)

Anyway, we had the unenviable task of breaking 3 miles of trail in heavy, dense wet snow. We quickly found out that the snowmobile could not fight its way through the snow; it just bogged down and overheated. So we took a pair of snowshoes with us, and we would take turns. One sister would strap on the snowshoes and break trail, while the other one sat on the snowmobile and rested. Then she'd catch up on the snowmobile and we would trade off. Snowshoeing through wet, heavy snow is absolutely miserable and exhausting, and even with the trail broken out by snowshoes, the snowmobile was still pushed to its absolute limits to wallow through the sloppy snow without falling off the trail. (We weren't very strong and had trouble keeping it pointed straight in those conditions.) It took us literally ALL DAY to make it down to the plowed airstrip, and I think we ended up spending the night at a neighbor's because we were bone tired, it was dark, and there wasn't even a chance that we could make it home that night. But hey, we had a planeful of parents and presents waiting for us, so we still had a good Christmas. :D