Not a Home-Maker

Word on the street/suite at work is that people here tend to buy each other presents for the holidays. I decided this weekend to get all of that taken care of and to do it in an assembly line style. There are 6 people in my immediate area. I bought everyone some little individual gift (small stuff like coffee or Burt's Bees stuff or a journal) and then burned CDs with my favorite holiday songs on them, then worried that maybe it's not appropriate to include Marilyn Monroe's "Santa Baby" or Bright Eyes' slightly painful-sounding"Blue Christmas" or--okay, here's the list. Two of the songs are unattributed, but what can you do; didn't have time to research them. Let me know if you want me to make you one a holiday mix too. It's easy:

Santa, Snow and Reindeer Glow, 2008

1. Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow! –Frank Sinatra
2. Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)—Death Cab for Cutie
3. Santa Baby—Marilyn Monroe
4. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel—Belle & Sebastian
5. Blue Christmas—Bright Eyes
6. Merry Christmas, Baby
7. All I Want for Christmas is You—Mariah Carey
8. I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus—The Jackson 5
9. Do They Know It’s Christmas? –Band-Aid
10. Jingle Bell Rock—Hall & Oates
11. Last Christmas—The Beatles
12. It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas—Perry Como
13. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer—Dolly Parton
14. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas—
15. I’ll Be Home for Christmas—Billie Holiday
16. White Christmas—Elvis Presley
17. Santa Claus Is Coming to Town—Bruce Springsteen

So, yeah, it's a little strange maybe. I like all of the songs though. And that is the important thing to remember when giving a gift; not how the recipient will feel about it but whether or not you like it.

Then I also decided to make sugar cookies using these little cookie cutters I bought last year. I didn't plan on baking from scratch--got one of those Betty Crocker mixes where you just add an egg and some butter, but even that was more challenging than I anticipated. The butter wasn't melted and wouldn't really melt and the recipe said to stir and not use a mixer, so I stirred it all together by hand, but I just knew that somewhere, a glob of butter was going unmixed and someone is going to get a cookie shaped like a gingerbread man that's made of pure lard. Next, I realized I don't have a rolling pin to flatten out the dough. I ingeniously took out a bottle of soy sauce, sprinkled some flour on it, and used that to roll out the dough. All was fine until the soy sauce started to leak (so there will also be a soy sauce cookie in the batch). I switched over to a peanut butter jar. Each little cookie turned out to be about the size of thimble, so making them took forever. I would put a batch in the oven and then see that it didn't look like I made a dent at all in the ball of dough. I probably ended up making about 500 Christmas cookies due to the tiny-ness of the cookie cutters. I realized pretty quickly that I wasn't enjoying the process much at all--that I just wanted to get it finished. They all turned out fine, but once you put frosting on the cookies like I did, you can't even tell what each shape is. I mean, they had these cute teddy bear and gingerbread man ones, but unless you're going to use an eye dropper to add features, it's impossible to see what the cookie is meant to be. So everyone got a little holiday bag of Christmas-y blobs this year.