A Random Christmas Meme

I've been tagged by Erika (who, by the way, makes some fantastic stuff. I love her diaper balm and her fiber lover's hand balm and for a barter she dyed me some yarn, too, that I can't wait to knit it!) Plus she is a really great friend, too!

13 Random things about me and Christmas

1. My all-time favorite Christmas music is The Roger Whittaker Christmas Album. When I was a kid, my parents would always put it on first when we came into the Christmas tree to open presents. When I was a grown-up, I bought it on CD and my kids like it now, too.

2. The year I was 12, it got really cold where I lived (in Houston!) and our pipes froze and burst. We didn't have water for 3 days. My mom was really sick with a virus of some sort, and I remember wrapping a lot of the presents for her and then a plumber came on Christmas Day and fixed the water. Those are the kind of Christmases you don't forget.

3. Fake trees don't offend me. We have a pre-lit slim tree since our house is small.

4. My youngest child is 2 and I still haven't sewn her stocking yet. It's cut out, but not sewn. She uses my old one in the meantime.

5. I don't like raisins in cinnamon rolls. My mother made them both ways to eat on Christmas morning.

6. The last couple years I haven't started wrapping until Christmas Eve when the kids go to bed.

7. I got married 2 days before Christmas. (Happy Anniversary honey!)

8. I like to eat ham for Christmas dinner.

9. It's harder than you think to come up with 13 random Christmas things.

10. In fact, so hard that I started writing this two days ago and couldn't get past 2.

11. Tomorrow I have to go shopping and get the last gift. It's hard to hide a bike for a 7-year-old.

12. We have one of those Fisher Price Little People Nativity sets. Three Christmases ago when we got out the decorations, baby Jesus was missing from the set. He's never turned up, so I finally bought a new one the year before last. I imagine that someday, I will find baby Jesus behind some shelves in the garage and I will have a really good story about "How I found Jesus."

13. We have colored lights on our tree. And usually on the outside of the house. But other projects have pre-empted the outdoor light installation this year.

I can't in good conscience tag anyone this close to Christmas, so do it if you want and leave a comment so I can come read!

When being frugal bites you in the backside

Yesterday I spent half the day making a triple batch of egg rolls and then I also made beef and broccoli stir fry. I deep fry the egg rolls and make sweet and sour sauce and they are SO good! And I put 3 meals worth in the freezer. Plus the stir-fry is also to die for. The downside is it makes a lot of dirty dishes. And it makes a mess of the stove.

Last night as I was cleaning the stove and the drip pans and washing all the dishes, I realized that being frugal once bit me in the backside.

My long time fans will remember that this house came up for sale the same day that we got an offer on our old house. When we bought this house, we closed on it 3 weeks before we closed the sale of our old house to give us time to move stuff over gradually. Once I came here to do some deep cleaning and I took the drip pans of the stove home with me to the old house to clean there. I have this great trick to clean them; I put them in a pot with some dishwasher detergent and boil them on the stove for a while. When you take them out, the grime just wipes right off. As I walked into the house from the garage, I dropped all the drip pans and three of them got dents on the edges and the paint chipped off. I priced replacements at the home center and they were 5 or 6 dollars a piece. I didn't buy them, and figured I could find them cheaper elsewhere.

Well, I was wrong. I never found them cheaper elsewhere, and now, four years later, I can't even find the same color drip pans. So every time I clean my stove and see those chipped edges, I am reminded that I should have just forked over the $20 to get new ones.

Has something like that ever happened to you?

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Over at Majestic Congo! All of today's items just went live, so go snatch up some soft-soled leather baby shoes or some beautiful stitch markers or some hand dyed yarn!