I thought I would have to work right on December 26th on a new project, but in fact I didn’t end up working the entire week. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t do much at all.
 
I went to sleep very late almost every night (3am!) but slept in till 9 or 10pm. The girls did not wake me up.
 

The Wall Street Journal picked up a story about our calendars online and in print over the weekend and I sold a bunch of calendars.
 
I finally bit the bullet and bought a new and bigger dining room table and chairs that I’ve been wanting to buy for the past 3 years. Sure, the table ended up being backordered, but after 3 years, what’s another 5 weeks?
 
I went and bought our plane tickets to our annual August Seattle trip because I found a good deal. I bought trip insurance for the first time because geez, that is more than half a year away.
 
TOY PURGE!
 
The weather stayed mild and sunny and it was a pleasure to walk around Central Park and climb big rocks and watch ice skaters at Wollman Rink (even though it’s now TRUMP Wollman Rink – when did this happen, have I been living under a rock) and watch tourists snap all sorts of pictures of themselves in front of…trees.
 
Despite swearing we’ll never go to midtown during the month of December if we can avoid it, we found ourselves doing just that very thing because we forget that it’s special kind of hell reserved only for the holidays, but this year, not only do we survive the crowds and walking against a wall of people coming at you down Fifth avenue, it’s bearable because of the nice weather.
 
Continuing on with the “why are we doing this” line of holiday activities, we ducked into Trump Towers (what) for a little ice cream break in the cafe. Sure, Claudine had a mini tantrum when she realized that what she really wanted was lime sorbet and not coconut (grrr), but other than that, it was almost pleasant to sit there, stare at the Christmas tree and listen to holiday music even though I was asking myself “why are we here” pretty much the whole time.
 
The tree at Rockefeller Center, which in past years has always been a bit of a let down when we go see it in person, looked more enchanting this year. Maybe because as we were walking away towards the Subway Station the tree started *twinkling*.
 
By the way, doesn’t Claudine look fancy in her shiny new silver coat? She looks like a little lady.
 
Happy new year.

It really was. Probably one of the nicest Christmases we’ve had in recent memory, despite all odds. We opened gifts and then went to the movies. I think the adults in the audience got more out of the Muppet Movie than the kids since it sort of revolved around the whole nostalgia factor (except I curse the movie for reminding me that “We Built This City” ever existed and now I can’t unhear that song when I had totally forgotten it existed, argh). Who didn’t get excited when the Muppet Show came on at 7:30 in the evening? We tried to explain to the kids what a big deal it was back then.
 
Mark finally got in the kitchen that afternoon after the movie and cooked a proper meal, something he hadn’t done in all of December. Roasted vegetables, roasted garlic, lamb, mashed potatoes, a mashup of Korean food. Oh, and bread pudding which is becoming our Christmas dessert of choice.
 
And…we finally opened our iPad which had been sitting on top of a dresser for about a month. Talk about self control! Incidentally, we ordered it so long ago that the iPad cover, which came in a separate package, is nowhere to be found because we put it away somewhere for “safekeeping” except we have no idea where it is. Hm…
 
So now that we have an iPad, what do we do with it except break up fights between the kids over how much time they get to use it? What apps should we get?

There is one tradition that we have that I completely forgot to tell you about, but sometimes traditions are like that. You don’t realize that you do something year after year until a few years pass and you finally make a note of it. I remember the first year we went to Ippudo after our first holiday season 4 years ago. We dropped off our last delivery in the East Village and headed over to what would become an annual celebratory dinner – our company Christmas party, ha! (and actually, did I tell you that Mia and Claudine did in fact help assemble over a hundred flat packed gift boxes this year? They took the job super seriously). Ippudo is one of those places where people start lining up at least a half hour before it opens and we don’t go there often if at all the rest of the year, so it always feels special.
 
Back home to hot chocolate and nibbles off this insane chocolate house my mom brought over a few weeks ago. Watching the Nutcracker on TV. Mark’s first night doing nothing on the couch in well over a month. A perfect start to Christmas vacation.

Claudine’s kindergarten class had the sweetest holiday party at school this week. The class parents decorated the room and set out a packet of confetti for each child to throw up in the air when we all counted down from 10 to yell “Happy New Year!” (ok, Miss C elected to just dump hers from the bag onto the floor in a most uncelebratory way).
 
A Christmas cracker filled with homemade silly putty, an organic lollipop (haaa, this is Park Slope, Brooklyn after all), and a tiny origami crane was set at each desk, and we made an edible craft project with bananas and tiny chocolate chips.
 
The kids made the parents Christmas cards (I’m the one in the yellow dress reaching up to the light switch to turn the tree lights on!) and bookmarks.
 
I am so thrilled at how well Claudine has adjusted to Kindergarten and so happy with her class and 2 teachers, but now that I realize Christmas vacation is a mere few hours away, the school year is nearly half over? How can that be?
 
I spent a few hours yesterday picking up last minute gifts and wrapping them all. I picked up the girls and we took a bus over to the Flea to visit Mark on the last day since the girls hadn’t seen him at all the last 2 days. Mia kept saying that she was so excited that Christmas was a few days away. I asked her what she was excited for and of course she blurted out “presents!”. It made me think about what Christmas means, what we’re doing for the kids. I’m not going to lie. I’m one of those people who get a bit melancholy over the holidays. I guess there have been enough unhappy and strange Christmases in my childhood that it sort of fills me with some level of anxiety and dread. But I do remember that sheer excitement as a kid, and getting together with our whole extended family on Christmas Eve for a party with all my cousins is what defined my childhood holiday memories.
 
I’m still trying to figure out how to make the holidays special for the girls. It used to be that Mark would work every Christmas when he was still a Pastry Chef. It made Christmas rather depressing, actually, to be alone with 2 babies on that day. Now that we have the business, it’s all craziness up until Christmas Eve. There isn’t a big family gathering. Christmas is often quiet. We’re still trying to figure out our own traditions, the ones that define the holidays when the girls look back on their childhoods.

well, hello.
 
Last night I came home from working the table all day at the Brooklyn Flea and collapsed on the couch and pretty much went to sleep right then and there. I hadn’t gone to the bathroom or eaten anything all day, not even a coffee(!) because I didn’t want to run to the bathroom every 10 minutes which is what happens when I drink coffee on an empty stomach. I have no explanation for not eating except that I was sandwiched in between the donut people and the pork belly people all day, so I don’t know, I guess I wasn’t feeling it because I was smelling food all day. I suddenly had the chills when I got home and was convinced that I was getting sick so I slept. I woke up past midnight and dragged myself to bed, but couldn’t fall back asleep till hours later of course. 1:45am, 2:30, 3:15. When I woke up in the morning I felt ok.
 
So I vacuumed. And cleaned. And dusted. And did laundry. And put things away. And cut snowflakes with the girls. And gave Mia a piano lesson.
 
Just normal things. It felt good. Almost like I woke up and all that other stuff from the previous weeks never happened. It’s sort of like pregnancy and child birth, you know? I think we’re programmed to forget the pain so that we’ll do it all over again.
 
My work for the business is pretty much done. I have some gift boxes to assemble this week, but not hundreds. Mark’s still in the trenches but it’s manageable, like a normal workload week, not stressful, crazy time orders pumped up on steroids (so far!). By Saturday night he was cooking dinner again for the girls when I got home, playing that game of cards that Claudine had wanted to play and reading them a bedtime story. He was back.
 
I read through last year’s December posts this afternoon out of curiosity while I drank my coffee this afternoon after all the cleaning was done. Even though I remembered just how crazy last holiday season was (with the added stress of big work deadlines that I thankfully didn’t have this this year), I was surprised at how lengthy some of the posts were…and I was even funny in some of them! But this holiday…I don’t know…kind of sucked the life out of us. Some sobering realities. I’ll share soon.

We’ve built up a nice collection of ornaments the past couple of years and it’s fun to pull them out and have the girls get excited about each one.
 
I have to fight from having guilty feelings every year for being so busy in December that the girls don’t get to do any fun holiday activities until Christmas Eve – or even have our attention, for that matter. This season so far has been particularly hard and it seems so unfair to them, but they don’t really know December as being anything else I guess. Family helps. Grandma comes to visit for a week to give them the attention we can’t give them and Mark’s sister has started the tradition of giving each of them little presents to open all month.
 
We also make sure to get a tree (thank god for free delivery in the neighborhood!) and little things like seeing Claudine’s face completely light up when she comes into the living room to see christmas lights strung around the mirror above our couch remind me that we probably don’t need to do any of that other stuff like visiting Santa (C would probably get scared anyway). But seeing her cry because neither of us have time to play a game of cards with her because we are up to our stressed eyeballs in getting these orders out and work deadlines met makes me sad.
 
December schedules are brutal. Any small business owner who is busy during the holidays knows this. It’s not just us. We’re at the point where we’re pretty delirious from sleep deprivation and working 18-19 hours a day. It’s a game of playing catch up so you don’t fall behind (disastrous!) and through it all, thoughts on how to make next holiday season easier start swirling around. We’re a few days away from a more sane schedule (I hope).

Oh, December…you are here. And we are in the throes of Holiday!Cookie!Madness! for our 4th year. Thousands of cookies will be baked per day, hundreds of bows will be tied (have you ever had to tie 200 little ribbons? It always takes longer than you think. 4-5 hours to tie 200 ribbons, for real – and by the 50th ribbon, your fingers forget what to do. I have looked up “how to tie a ribbon” videos on youtube, true fact), paper will be trimmed, folded and stacked for wrapping, and hundreds of packages will be made and stamped. It’s true, every Fall fills us with a little bit of dread as we head into 16 hr work days until the Christmas holiday, but at this point in our 4th year of business, we know what to expect and how much we can handle so we can minimize the crazy at least just a little bit.
 
This year we’re lucky to have a little more help than the past 3 years as two of Mark’s old pastry staff from his restaurant days are coming in 2 days per week on their days off all month to help him bake those thousands of cookies (although Mark can and does bake up to 2000 cookies himself and I still don’t understand how that’s humanly possible, I really don’t). Hopefully that means that we can extend our ordering deadlines by a few days and not turn away some of the larger orders that we sometimes need to in order to maintain our sanity.
 
And the holiday fairs! The season is here and we’re kicking it off by participating in the West Elm/Etsy Handmade Holiday Fair tonight at the West Elm Dumbo store in Brooklyn from 6-9pm.
 
Next weekend, Dec 10 & 11, the Bust Magazine Holiday Craftacular expands to 2 days with a new location in Soho, and we’ll be back at the Brooklyn Flea One Hanson for 5 dates starting December 16th. We’ll have calendars, prints and tea towels available at all 3 events (and thanks to Epicurious for featuring our calendar in their gift guide)
 
The holidays wheeeeeeeeee……zzzzzzzzzzzz

Some dumpling making action over Thanksgiving weekend with my mom and the girls.
 
My mom claims that she hasn’t made homemade dumplings in 20 or so years. I do remember making them with her and my grandmother. She was telling the girls that when I was a kid, there weren’t that many Korean grocery stores and that they would have to make all the foods that are readily available now at stores, like dumplings and sheets of salted, toasted seaweed – you know, the kind that you can buy now already cut up in 2″ x 3″ rectangles in a foil packet. My grandmother would brush sesame oil on each large piece of seaweed, sprinkle some salt and then turn them over the fire on the stove to toast each side. She’d then cut the stacked toasted sheets into smaller pieces with a knife and store them in tupperware containers for the week. Sometimes I would help brush the sesame oil on the seaweed or snip off the roots of beansprouts before they would go into the steamer.
 
The girls were super into making dumplings especially since it’s Mia’s favorite food. Claudine, not so much, but making them appealed to her meticulous nature and they could have made dumplings for days. I don’t know if this happens to you, but sometimes I see flashbacks of when I was a kid when I see the girls with my parents. Making dumplings with grandma…just like I used to as a kid.

The holidays are coming! The holidays are coming! Can you believe Thanksgiving is less than 2 weeks away? Oh…the craziness is about to start. Some biz news to share with you now that some holiday events are being confirmed.
 

We’ll be at the West Elm/ Etsy Holiday Mini Mart on December 1st, 6-9pm in the West Elm Dumbo, Brooklyn store.
This year, the Bust Holiday Craftacular is an entire weekend with a new location! December 10th & 11th at 82 Mercer Street in Soho.
 

We’re also excited to announce that our products are in a new Brooklyn shop in our very own neighborhood. Valley Shepherd Creamery is a NJ based creamery who just opened a store on 211 7th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Support our new local cheese shop!
 
…And Philly friends, more marshmallows and cookies are back on the shelves at Green Aisle Grocery in Philadelphia.
 
For a list of all of our current retailers, visit our retailers page. We may be adding a few more soon.
 
Have a great weekend, friends. We’re having a few girls over from school for Claudine’s Birthday, take 2. I keep forgetting we’re throwing a party. Oh, and my crazy freelance work schedule is over for now (until the crazy holidaze kicks in, that is), so hopefully I’ll be around the blog more next week. I recently passed 1000 posts (this is post 1017)! Craziness!

Such a lovely night for trick or treating, especially after all that freakish snow. The weather was perfect and the neighborhood was lively and festive. Our friend who visited over the weekend from Southern California said that she couldn’t believe how many adults dressed up for Halloween in NY. I guess people take this holiday very seriously here! I mean look at the 2nd and 3rd photo. A neighbor who builds a haunted house in the yard of his brownstone builds these elaborate facades in front of his building every year. This year’s was the best by far. It’s cool to walk past the build out every day on our way to school, but see the finished structure on Halloween night where people line up to enter his haunted yard. And the dude that was sitting lifeless in a box in the middle of the yard dressed as Elvis or Evel Knievel – I don’t even know – jumped out and totally scared us. I mean screaming type of scared. I love this neighborhood. The free candy ain’t bad either.