Quote of the week - The ninth door

What do you know about Santa Claus? Where did he come from? Has he ever been a child?
Of course we could rehash the usual stories now. I could tell you about St. Nicholas again, I could tell you about that he is dressed either as the bishop who really lived, or that he used to wear different colors like brown or blue and that Coca Cola really was the company to make Santa Claus look like most of us think of him today, in the red coat with the white fur, with white hair and and a long beard, ho-ho-ho and children on his knee who tell him their wishes.

This Christmas story is different, though. Imagine Lapland hundreds of years ago.
A boy named Nikolas loses his parents and little sister due to a tragic accident on Christmas, so the whole village decided to take care of him. Nikolas stays with each family for one year, then he moves on. To show his gratitude he carves toys for the children of his former families. After six years, however, a bad harvest and bad luck at fishing mean no one can afford to take him in.
That's when the carpenter Iisakki who lives far from the village that he only visits to sell his goods offers to take the boy for a year. Although the relationship isn't easy in the beginning as Iisakki is not fond of children, he teaches Nikolas how to be a carpenter. One night he catches him in the workshop where Nikolas is preparing the Christmas gifts for the village children. He forbids it at first, but then decides to help him. He also asks the boy to stay although the year is over.
When Iisakki gets old, he moves away, but leaves his house, workshop and money to Nikolas who has become like a son to him. Nikolas who has always been a bit of an hermit takes this as a sign to dedicate his life to Christmas and bring presents to the children of all the villages in the area.

We still won't get around the red suit, though! As the distance between the villages is quite big, Nikolas gets himself four reindeer for his sleigh from Hilla. He thinks they will be easy to train, but the reindeer have their own opinion about that.

Only when Nikolas follows Hilla's advice and has a red suit made, they start listening to him and the legend of Santa Claus is about to begin.

Christmas Story, Finland, 2007

Christmas song - The eighth door

When I was a kid, our parson once asked me to come to his office after confirmation class. He was a really cool guy, smart, friendly, listened to us young ones just as he would to the grown ups, never got mad at us, never was surprised by our shenanigans (a certain raid in his garden with some of his apples being mysteriously gone comes to my mind for example, and no, I wasn't part of that one), was always open for questions and never ever condescending. Who knows, had I met more like him in church, I may think differently about it today. That's not what this is about, though.
When I got up there, he told me someone had given him two sets of books by Theodor Storm saying he should give one of them to a child he thought would appreciate it. Most of them were in Fraktur, a Gothic typeface, and he thought I should have them because he knew I was going to be able to read it fluently.
I have no idea why he chose me, I'm sure there were others who could read Fraktur, maybe he did it because I was so crazy about books or maybe he wanted to teach me something. Maybe I was just the first one he saw ;-) It doesn't matter, I was very pleased and possibly a little proud. This was more than 40 years ago, and I still have those books and treasure them although I haven't read them in a long time.

In honor of him I'll share this Christmas poem by Storm. H.K. (which we called him for short, not to his face of course although I'm sure he knew), this one's for you.


Weihnachtslied (Christmas Song)

From Heaven into valleys deep
The mild light of a star descends,
From fir tree woods a fragrance sweet
Ascending through the cold night breathe;
And lit by candles is the night.

My heart is startled now with joy,
It is the Christmas time so dear!
Afar I hear the church bells toll,
So dear and homely they call
Me back into a fairy tale.

Again, I stand in adoration,
The old enchantment holds me still;
Before my eyes, from deep oblivion
Lost childhood's golden dreams return.
I feel, a miracle has happened here.

From the page of Electric Scotland

Oberhofen Church ("my" church back then, picture taken in 2010)

Stash tackler ornaments - The seventh door

Few of you will remember my very first wire crochet Christmas baubles. Unbreakable, unusual, some of them still available ;-) Since then I have made different kinds of decorations, but most of them were wire knitted which I only realized after a conversation with a co-worker the other day. Why had I never tried to crochet around a bauble?
Well, that could easy be changed. I had already strung some, okay, a lot of mixed color seed beads on a copper wire and I choose black baubles for the filling as the contrast would show the difference between the two techniques nicely.

After starting the wire crochet bauble, I knew why I prefer wire knitting for ornaments. To achieve the perfect shape for your bauble, you actually work on the bauble, at least I do. That's a lot easier to do if you knit because the wire structure isn't as dense, is much more forgiving when you press it against the bauble and easier to shape, and of course because the beads are between the stitches.
In wire crochet you usually work from the inside if you don't have a flat piece and the beads appear on the outside, but try to do that if there is already a bauble on the inside! So I turned it the wire structure around after a few rows, so the beads are on the inside now, but you can still see them peek through.
The other downside is that it takes even longer than knitting around a bauble, but it definitely has a very different look and also gave me two new ideas for later some time.

Now the wire knit bauble. You see all the beads perfectly well, the look is very airy and less "messy" as you have just one layer of wire whereas crocheting is more three-dimensional because you pull the extra wire through to make a stitch.

Here they are in one picture together, so you can compare them even better. Let me add that in the right light the wire crochet bauble sparkles more because the layers of wire and the texture capture the light better. I wonder which one would win the sparkle battle, though, if I had used only silver lined beads or maybe even crystals as the beads are so much more visible in the wire knit bauble.
I also feel the temptation to see which one breaks more easily when dropping them, but the crochet bauble just took too long for that.
In the end I guess it's just a matter of taste which one you like better (let's not forget these are quite unconventional colors for Christmas baubles, too ;-)).

This post goes well with my other posts about the difference between techniques like wire crochet, wire knit, netting, and Viking knit, by the way. You can find them here, here and here.

Oldies but Goodies - Renaissance Fair, The sixth door

I have never been to a Renaissance fair. There have been a few near or even in my town, but not that many, and there's no chance I'm going there. It's the people or rather the number of people. I just can't deal with crowds anymore, not even for a while. Strolling through the city is already enough for me, but too many people in one place, no can do.
This is also the reason why I have never been to the Esslinger Medieval and Christmas Market (if you have a look, ignore that they haven't updated all the dates, this IS for 2018), no matter how much everyone raves about it. Pity because it may have been the perfect introduction for this post.
Then again a Renaissance fair is not always set in medieval times at all, but often in the era of Queen Elizabeth I. But how did they celebrate Christmas back then?

When I looked it up, this caught my eye first "Christmas customs are hard to pin down and harder still to identify as verifiably in use during the Elizabethan era. (The past is not all the same place.) With the shifts from Catholic to protestant and back and forth again, some customs were banned or simply stopped, revived, then abandoned. Here are some of the things we're sure of." (from "Life in Elizabethan England).

Houses were decorated with all kinds of green, for example holly, ivy, yew and more. Hospitality was the rule, so whatever could be afforded, was there, from meat to pies, from spiced wine to drinks from hot cider, sherry or ale with spices and apples. "Eat, drink and be merry" (from "BBC History") was the motto for the Twelve Days from Christmas Eve to Epiphany. The merry part consisted of gambling, plays, morris dancing and general silliness.
There was also the custom of the Yule log, a block of wood cut from a tree chosen for the occasion and put into the fireplace, then lit using a bit of last year's log that has been saved. The Yule log is expected to burn all night.

Okay, people, you know what you have to do, and don't you forget about that silliness! ;-)
For decorating purposes I also offer you this selection of jewelry that could be worn at a Renaissance fair from the last Jewelry Artisans Community Oldies but Goodies Challenge.

1 and 5 Cat's Wire
2 RioRita
3 and 7 Jewelry Art by Dawn
4 and 6 MC Stoneworks

The Victorian way - The fifth door

I don't remember how I first discovered Mrs Crocombe on English Heritage's YouTube channel or which one was the first video I watched, but like many others, judging from all the comments, I became a fan of the good lady immediately. Those videos are made so beautifully.
Avis Crocombe is no fictional character, she was the cook to the Braybrooke family who spent the summers at Audley End House, their country mansion in Essex (I wish I had known about it when we were in Cambridge, so we could have gone there). A visitor to the house recognized the name which had been mentioned in a book handwritten by his aunt. This aunt was Avis Crocombe and it was her recipe book that he then donated to English Heritage. Most of The Victorian Way shows Mrs Crocombe preparing some of those recipes.

This Christmas punch looks like something I could make. I'd just need some ginger wine and some more people to help me drink it unless I find out the perfect measurements to make some only for myself ;-)

Hogfather - The fourth day

You may not know who the Hogfather is, so here's a short explanation. He's the Discworld's equivalent to Santa Claus. You mean you don't know the Discworld, either? Sigh. Okay. A very smart, witty and funny man named Terry Pratchett told us about the Discworld, a flat world carried by four elephants who are standing on a giant turtle making its way through space. It's a magic place full of wizards, witches, trolls, vampires, dwarves and so much more.
Back to the Hogfather. One of the things he does is to bring children presents on Hogswatch night in a sleigh pulled by four hogs. Until the Auditors of Reality pay an assassin to get rid of him, that is. So Death has to dress up and take on the job while his granddaughter Susan tries to save the Hogfather.

When I got my pal this fabulous advent calendar for his birthday, I hadn't expected that I would be sent one free of cost, but it made me very happy. I have no idea why I didn't order one for myself in the first place!

It seems Gundel is determined to help me with my advent calendar (no, I didn't put her there) which is fine by me, but she's not getting any of the chocolate (no chocolate for cats, it's not good for them!).

P.S. Oh, and if you want to know more about the history of advent calendars, check out my post from 2010.

O Christmas Tree - The third door

Gundel is in her favorite place on the stairs, Ponder has lost consciousness in his cat tower's plushy softness - a good moment to set up my Christmas tree.
Last year I had been searching for my ornaments, I thought I lost my mind. Turns out I did, there were in the same box in the same safe spot they had been during the last few years, but you know how it sometimes is with those safe spots. This year my memory didn't fail me, so here they are.
Yup, almost all of my tree decorations fit into a small box, but then my artificial tree is not exactly big, either. You can see the beaded bauble my friend Caroline made, some of my "pineapple slices", a few Christmas spider legs and my octopus bauble's tentacles peeking out.

As soon as I had the tree out, my second supervisor arrived on the scene. She gave a few branches a short nibble and went around the tree to check if I had bent all the branches the right way. Looks to me as if Supervisor Gundel is fine with what she saw.

The hardest part for me are the lights and the ball chain. Yeah, the baubles will hide the messy look, I think. As you can see my trusted wooden cats are helping to keep the tree in place (plus one of the branches is wrapped around the railing ;-)).

By then Gundel had decided she needed a second look. That chain didn't look very safe. Neither did it to me after she started pawing it! I still kept going. There are my earliest prototypes of wire crochet baubles, my wire knit and few beaded baubles, the beaded goodies from my friend, gifts from the neighbors like wooden stars and more, tiny baubles from my pal, the snowmen I made, the weird little octopus and the "mace" baubles. Last but not least I put my wire knit "flame" on top and of course Christmas Jack to guard everything!

It's a pity that it is such a grey day which makes it hard for me to take a good picture. Maybe I'll post another one if I find the chance and the light is good enough.

Well, and then the first bauble fell. While I had been decorating, there were some mysterious bauble shakes and I kept seeing a little black paw, but only when I was done, there it went - but didn't break!
So if you feel like betting on the cats or the tree, let me know! ;-)