Spending the day talking nonstop with  girliejones

Receiving presents from our girls’ various grandmothers all day (Raeli has had way too much sugar and scored a giant elephant puppet)

Chocolate chocolate chocolate

Gingerbread, shortbread, Ashgrove cheese and crackers, olives, cream cheese-stuffed peppers, apple cider, basically anything we saw in the supermarket and could justify because ‘it’s Tasmania, so Alisa needs to try it’

Entirely failing to make cupcakes, the one actual thing I had planned to do today.

 aifin making sushi & pancakes for dinner, mmmm christmas food.

Chat, more chat, sewing time, chat. Heads have almost fallen off from total conversation.

 aifin,  girliejones and I hanging out in the living room, tweeting each other about the plans for bringing Santaness into the house (stocking have been hung up with care & four year old is finally asleep) but not actually getting up off the couch to do so because hey, it’s not midnight yet.

The hashtag #jewtriesxmas has sadly not become a trending topic, though it has been entertaining on Twitter to watch her going through her disillusionment as regards who drinks the milk that was put out for Santa…

Merry Everything, one and all!

Wow, so this domestic thing. People do this every day? I’ve been spending the last 3 days predominantly on housework, and I’m definitely over it. Still, the house is clean and tidy for Christmas, we’re way better organised than we were last year, and apart from the tree randomly falling over and the second batch of shortbread being sniffed at suspiciously by my daughter, there have been no catastrophes.

(ah, the gingerbread house fail of… too many years to count, ahh the Christmas I was 8 months pregnant and decided to make my own puddings but in my exuberance failed to read the recipe and ended up going to bed while my honey stayed up until 1am watching a boiling pot… ahh)

The guest room is really pretty, though, and I’m leaving in under an hour to pick up anything (apart from maybe paper towels, grumble mumble) which means for once I can have a relaxing Christmas Eve. Oh, and my obsessive podcast-habit means that from now on, baking shortbread and gingerbread daleks will always remind me of the Radio Free Skaro boys.

I’ve done ridiculously well with gifts received already this year. The latest is the most beautiful leather-cover edition of Room with a View, a book I love greatly, and have been meaning to replace my battered orange paperback with a shiny new orange paper back for some time.

I can’t tell you how gorgeous this book is – not only lovely in its own right, but wrapped in Penguin-stamped tissue paper and placed in an elegant cardboard book. It’s a lovely object I can’t stop looking at and, oh yes, I’ll be re-reading this book very soon. How can I not?

It occurs to me that this was possibly the last beloved classic novel that I didn’t have a really nice edition of – a friend once gifted me with a gorgeous set of ancient hardback copies of The Forsyte Saga that he found in an aunt’s attic, I have a lovely old green edition of Wuthering Heights (and matching Jane Eyre, bah, but I keep it cos it matches) that dates from my mother’s brief ‘old books’ hobby phase, and I bought myself a proper hardback of Pride & Prejudice from a uni bookshop. Now Room with a View.

Yep, those are the important ones. Which books do you love so much that, even if you already have a copy, a lovely hardback edition would be an awesome present for you?

So a few people have asked for my dairy and gluten free gingerbread recipe – I feel a bit guilty about posting this, because I’m pretty sure I don’t have the recipe right yet. It’s very much a work in progress. If you try it for yourself and add any tweaks that improve on it, please let me know! In particular I think the mix of flours could use work…

Gingerbread Personages (gluten and dairy free)

Dry Stuff:
1.5 cups potato flour
2 cups rice flour
1/2 tsp bicarb of soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1-2 tsp ground ginger

Wet Stuff:
1 egg
1 cup brown sugar (firmly packed)
2/3 cup treacle
140g pureed apple

1. Mix wet stuff in one bowl, and dry stuff in another bowl.
2. Mix contents of two bowls together; stir well, should end up a soft and sticky dough
3. Cover and refrigerate for at least an hour (overnight also good)

4. Pre-heat oven to 180?C (350?F)
5. Heavily flour (any gluten free option – rice, potato, corn) your cutting board & rolling pin. Carefully roll out gingerbread a small handful at a time to 1cm or so thick.
6. Cut out shapes with cookie cutters – gingerbread people, daleks, rabbits, whatever you have handy.

7. Place shapes on oven tray lined with baking paper. Leave a couple of cm between each but they shouldn’t spread that much.
8. Bake for 8-9 minutes.
9. DO NOT LEAVE IN HOT OVEN, COOL IN FRESH AIR ON WIRE TRAYS (sorry for shouting, just telling my future self)
10. Should make about 3 trays worth of biscuits.

You can decorate with icing made from pure icing sugar & water/eggwhite, bits of dried fruit, or any other dairy & gluten-free tidbit.

Last night we had a Christmas gathering for our usual Thursday night horde. We finished up Battlestar Galactica a couple of weeks ago, so it seemed oddly appropriate to watch the new Doctor Who (Waters of Mars) as our interim ‘episode of the week.’ A DVD set of the Tudors was gifted, so that will be our next show that we try to watch while small children are wandering in and out, shrieking randomly and dismantling each other’s bedrooms.

I made gingerbread! Dairy and gluten free gingerbread, thank you very much. The recipe, largely created and altered by me, was sadly not viewed at its best because I did the stupid thing of leaving the biscuits in the oven after they had finished baking, so they dried out to a consistency of dog biscuits. But hey, the kids (ha well, the boys, but I knew going in Raeli wasn’t a gingerbread fan) seemed to like them and they did look cool. I sent  godiyeva home with a ball of leftover dough and hopefully her competence will at least reveal if the recipe was any good. If not – she can always spray paint the biscuits silver and hang them on the Christmas tree.

The baking process was convoluted not because of the recipe but because of the complex machinations required to allow three children between the ages of 4 and 6 to have an equal share of the adding ingredients, stirring, rolling and stamping out shapes. Phew! We all survived.

The important thing is gingerbread daleks! Sure it would be nice if they tasted any good, but at least they are there. Kind of like dwarf bread. They’ll last all through Christmas! (luckily I had made some decent shortbread earlier in the week which the adults & Raeli were able to enjoy)
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So I’ve been playing with Scrivener for a couple of days now, and it’s pretty cool, I have to say. I’ve uploaded the manuscript of Cabaret of Monsters (book 2 of the Creature Court) and have been footling with the features – dividing it into scenes (ridiculously easy) and labelling each scene with title, synopsis, keywords.

Okay, I’ve only done a couple of scenes. But I am enjoying the process and this seems to be a very good way to get back in contact with my novel after a six-seven week separation. It’s also well and truly doing the job of getting the novel back in my head – out driving yesterday evening I was thinking about it, turning the story and characters over and over. Thank goodness!

One of the things that I’ve realised is that the second half of the novel, which I wrote super-fast and finished in a haze of sleep deprivation as I tiptoed back to the novel after having Jem, is written entirely in the wrong order. I wrote chunks of scenes/plot with the same characters when they are actually going to need to be separated out. So… yes, Scrivener is my friend! I’m going to need it over the next couple of months.

Catherynne Valente (@catvalente) tweeted recently that she also opens a Scrivener ‘project’ each season (winter, spring, etc), and uses it for all of her short story and non fiction WIPs. This seemed like a brilliant idea, so I did this too, uploading my Sprawl-submission-in-progress and my Leviathan-review-in-progress. Which of course means that I didn’t progress either project today.

I did, however, make shortbread with my big girl, introduce my littlest girl to the wonders of Bonjela (yes, teething already) and we managed to take some vaguely Christmassy photos today.

Also, my review of Rampant by Diana Peterfreund is up at AsIf!

My daughter’s continuing religious education at the hands of Christmas carols and other kinder kids continues. Move over, Twilight and Harry Potter fans! The greatest piece of fanfic has now been told. Sadly, none of you will ever get to hear it, but we were treated to it on our way home tonight: a complex, epic filk taking in the tunes and some of the lyrics of at least half a dozen carols, and depicting the birth, life and magical adventures of Lord Jesus.

The best bit was how ‘Lord Jesus’ (she always called him that, so polite to include his title!) took on many elements borrowed from Raeli’s own life, such as the time she burned her finger on a light, and her vegetable preferences. She went through his childhood, year by year, sharing only most the salient points with us in verse, and then skipping over those dull teenage years to adulthood.

In case you’re wondering how it all ended, he met a girl, became an angel, and then had angel babies with her. Which, quite frankly, is an improvement on the original. (I really don’t want to have to be the one to explain to her how the story is actually supposed to end, but thanks to the Aladdin pantomime the issue of people dying and then coming back to life isn’t a problem – the problem is that she expects that’s what happens when everyone dies!)

Oh and I know that nine million of you have already seen the Muppets doing Bohemian Rhapsody, but  godiyeva has not, so consider this my bit in promoting it as the UK Christmas Number One.

This post from Penni Russon about her eldest child figuring out the Santa thing made my heart hurt a little bit.

Ah, the Santa quandary. To lie, or not to lie?

Our only defence is that we never told Raeli that Santa is a real person who flies around giving out Christmas presents. But when she came home from daycare and informed us about that fact – we copped out and smiled and didn’t deny it. It was easy to let other people spread the story, and to let her believe it. (cough, likewise I didn’t disabuse her from her latest theory, that all the dead people in the world especially Tigey the budgie and Kassia the cat and her great-grandparents who died before she was born are coming back some day – it makes her happy and less panicky, and I don’t have any coherent religious concepts to share with her, so I’m going lalalala and ignoring it)

I’ve regretted the Santa myth a few times. Quite frankly when I go to so much trouble to pick out lovely thoughtful perfect presents for her, I want the damn credit. I’ve almost put my foot in my mouth several times over, when bitching to friends about the sheer effort it takes, for instance, to source a Beauty and the Beast DVD without paying more than anyone should pay for a single movie.

That, and I really hate lying to my child. It makes me feel icky inside. We talk about story a lot, how they work and adapt and change, and I’m hoping that we can segue into Santa being ‘a nice story’ without any trauma, some year really soon. Hope. Of course by then Raeli will have passed the Santa myth on to Jem and we’ll smile and buy into it… sigh.

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