The simple joys in life bring me the most happiness. Christmas tree hunting with Beau is one of the best things we do all year.
This was Beau’s third year Christmas tree hunting. She doesn’t contribute anything but cuteness to the adventure. Actually, it’s a total hassle bringing a dog. Trying to find the perfect tree to fit in the home I have and not the massive living room I wish you had and cutting down a tree with a saw while juggling an enthusiastic people greeter on black Friday at a Christmas tree farm is a hand full. Worth it! But a handful.
Last year, we took our Christmas picture at the Christmas tree farm. Beau was cooperative for picture last year. This year… a whole different story. We weren’t planning on taking the Christmas picture… but a nice picture would have been grand. There is ONE picture where she’s looking at the camera. The rest, she’s straining trying to go say ‘hi’ to all the people cooing at her. Suffice to say, we gave up on the family photo this year. *Insert our efforts here.*
Beau was more comfortable on the tractor this year. She even laid down. A cute little boy, named Leo, gave her a sticker. She didn’t love it, but she managed to keep it on until we got to the car. A five year olds feelings were not hurt on our search.
We’re working on decorating the tree today. It’s been up and decorated with lights since Friday, but we’ve been busy [read as: lazy], so it hasn’t been done yet. My office is decorated, and most of the house is decorated. Just the tree and a few garland strings need to be put up to finish the look!
Now it’s time to start baking because I have fun recipes coming your way for Christmas/winter inspired goodies!!!
Fun Fact: I am allergic to Christmas trees. I can’t touch them because they make me itchy. If they poke me hard enough, which is not hard at all, I break out in cute little pustules. Merry Christmas, I look like I have the plague.
bisous und обьятий, Beau + RaeAnna
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Worth A Read Meh Length 240 Quick Review Darcy Fitzwilliam returns to Pemberley, Ohio for Christmas when her mother gets sick and meets her childhood nemesis Luke Bennet.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has provided inspiration for readers and authors alike, inspiring retellings and fanfiction. Melissa de la Cruz joins numerous others in reworking the classic to fit into the modern world for a contemporary audience. Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe is a unique adaptiation.
Darcy Fitzwilliams comes from money, but she made her own when she took on New York City. After eight years away, she returns home to Pemberley at Christmas time after her mother has a heart attack. There’s family and romantic drama galore.
de la Cruz is inventive with character names, genders, and sexualities, which adds diversity to the classic. Instead of focusing on the traditional Elizabeth Bennet character, it is told from the Darcy perspective, who is now an influential business woman with a gay best friend, cue Bingley.
I like the reinvention happening in Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe, but it falls into the same traps many retellings do. Insult to injury, all the problems plaguing Christmas Hallmark movies are seen within the pages. Mistletoe is completely devoid of societal critique let alone the sharp with Austen is known for. It waters down a classic romance to nothing more than a shallow love story. The narrative can’t even rely on clever language; at the best of times, the syntax is clunky and highly repetitive. de la Cruz is spoon feeding emotions, plots, personalities, and how-to-feels to the reader like a Christmassy treacle.
Darcy is supposed to be a strong independent woman but plummets into the anti-feminist and problematic ideology of “boys will be boys, and they’re mean to girls they like.” I don’t believe a woman with her drive, career, and education would act or react in any of the ways the character does in Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe. They’re unrealistic throughout, but the last quarter is bullshit. In the original, Darcy never leads anyone on, where as this version leads on a genuinely decent man, and she’s just mean.
Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe was made into a Hallmark movie, and I can see why. It supplies all the romance people love to see during the holidays without any real substance.
Sometimes I’m real basic. I like to support local coffee shops as much as possible, but you know, Starbucks calls. And it’s hard to pass up a photo opportunity with their cute Christmas/holiday cups!
My best friend, Alex, worked at Starbucks in college. He would always wake me up in the morning with a caramel apple spice or something else delicious he made up for me. It’s hard not to love free! When I miss him, I still head to Starbucks for a caramel apple spice.
They are everywhere, and you always know what you’re getting. As a traveler, Starbucks is nice because it feels familiar on the other side of the world or in an airport.
Rewards programs get me every time. Alex made me get a reward program almost nine years ago. I’ve been a gold member every since. I get tons of free coffee, and now that they updated the program, I can buy merchandise with my stars!!! (My wallet was stolen four years ago, and I’m still pissed my gold card was stolen. So much ANGER.)
I have one 137 steps from my front door. A gate opens up from my apartment complex into a Starbucks parking lot. Convenience is sometimes key. It’s hard to compete with a minute away. I’m doing a service to the earth by not using gas, bringing my own cup, and taking my dog for a walk.
Puppuccinos are Beau’s favorite thing. She will get mad and sassy if I come home with a Starbucks cup or a green straw and no puppuccino for her. Yes she can tell the difference. I have checked.
I like being able to scan my phone and pay with the app. It’s convenient. I can grab a coffee while out on a walk with Beau even though I leave my wallet. I’m responsible, so this never happens, except all the time.
I can send Starbucks gift cards to my best friend as a treat, when she has something to celebrate, or she’s having a lousy day through the app. It’s easy to make a small gesture. Or for a last minute birthday/Christmas/whatever present if you forget.
They treat their employees well. Alex loved his time at Starbucks, and we’re still friends with lots of his coworkers. Some still work there because it’s a good job. I like supporting businesses which treat their employees well.
Christmas cups are selling point for me. I love the holiday season. I’m not religious, but Christmas is my jam. They get behind it with their red cups and holiday merchandise. Yay!!!
No matter where you are in the world, you know what you’re going to get. Starbucks makes sure everything is cohesive. A vanilla latte will taste the same in Iowa as it does in London or Munich. I know because I have product tested in those locations.
They’re nice. Starbucks takes customer experience seriously. I have met some of the nicest people behind their counters. No snarky baristas there. Or if they’re snarky, it’s because they’re being funny and playing off my snarkiness.
bisous und обьятий, RaeAnna
I’m also including a bunch of Christmas pajamas that I love and wear
this time of year… and all year round because I’m weird.
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Worth A Read Absolutely Length 320 Quick Review Zitkála-Šá uses her experience as Sioux woman to write nonfiction stories, short stories, and poems to fight for change and equality long before the fight received any recognition.
November is National Native American Heritage Month, and I never knew that until this year when I looked up to see if they had a month… Suffice to say, we could do better educating the people of this country about the indigenous people who lived here long before we barged in and stole their land. I don’t know very much about native culture or history, so I definitely need to do better. After reading Zitkála-Šá’s American Indian Stories, I need to make more of an effort to read and appreciate Native American literature and writing.
There’s a shitty irony in the fact American Indian Stories is written in English, the language of the colonizer. Zitkála-Šá writes about her life and tells stories inspired by her people, but in order to get published or reach a wide audience, she had to write in English. A language she was not raised speaking and struggled to learn in a harsh and cruel environment.
American Indian Stories paints a beautiful and heartbreaking picture of a land and a close knit community ingrained with caring for the needs of others, respect each other, and being a part of nature. It’s more than a book about being a native child and woman; it’s about her journey into activism. From being a young child chasing her own shadow on the plains to a child angrily hiding from a haircut or ruining turnips for dinner in the city, she pushed back and followed her own path.
The writing is beautiful. Even when the stories are being told from a child’s perspective, they are poignant, “I sank deep into the corner of my seat, for I resented being watched.” or “”… for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.” The contrast between home on the plains and living in a boarding house in the city is stark. In the modern world full of sound, lights, technology, and people, I didn’t think about the sensory attack it was for her to move into a bustling city. Her inability to move or feel the breeze from the plains would have been stifling in its own right. The language and style Zitkála-Šá utilizes throughout American Indian Stories changes to punctuate the emotions she or her characters were going through. Life on the plains was illustrated with long and flowing syntax to the point of being lackadaisical. Her experiences in the boarding house and among white people changed the style into short sentences with precise punctuation, which only reveals a small part of the tension, anxiety, anger, and sadness she must have been feeling at the time.
Zitkála-Šá depicts strong people and characters in her book. The most interesting and abundant characters are strong women. She was an incredibly strong woman herself. She was a writer, musician, activist, politician, and more, so it should be no surprise, her characters are independent women. In “A Warrior’s Daughter,” she shows a woman can be brutal warriors, saviors, and gentle all at the same time. They don’t have to choose between being strong and vulnerable or a warrior and a wife; women are capable of great things simultaneously.
As a native Midwesterner from a neighboring state to Zitkála-Šá’s home state of South Dakota, her descriptions of nature resonate with my history. The land she ran across as a child is the same land I did. There are stark differences, of course. As a child standing on a hill looking at the rolling fields and feeling a sense of belonging and freedom, we were the same for a moment. These shared histories and emotional memories are what connect us as humans across differences and time. She was born 115 year before I was into a very different life and way of life, but her home is my home. Reading her childhood memories of South Dakota in American Indian Stories felt like reading my own childhood memories of Iowa.
Through so much of this book, I kept thinking What the fuck, white people??? As a linguist – and probably as an intersectional human being – I can’t fathom thinking corporal punishment will make children suddenly speak a foreign language. The whole boarding house situation was appalling. There was no understanding of children or their needs, let alone the needs of children from different backgrounds, cultures, and languages. It broke my heart. I knew what happened and went on, but it’s another thing to read someone’s experiences.
American Indian Stories is a beautiful book. It’s small. It has an incredible emotional depth full of meaning and insight into our past as Americans and what has been done. It is heartbreaking and relatable because her experiences are human. Zitkála-Šá calls out the wrongs she and her people faced a century ago, but those wrongs continue to be done.
Memorable Quotes “The most gruesome conflict, make no mistake, was within the self, in the individual heart that was, at one time, culturally defined by connection to others.” Forward by Layli Long Soldier “They treated my best judgement, poor as it was, with the utmost respect.”
Worth A Read Yes Length 271 Quick Review Charles Dickens is having a midlife crisis at Christmas time, and his publishers are demanding a Christmas novel when everything in his life is falling apart.
Silva bases her novel, Mr. Dickens and His Carol, off a real winter of Dickens’ life but reimagines and reorders facts and people to make an interesting novel. I’ve read a fair few Christmas novels, and this is far from the worst.
Charles Dickens should be feeling joy welcoming another child into the world before Christmas, but instead he’s feeling everything but. His latest book was a disaster, his family’s debts are piling up, his wife takes the children and leaves him, and his publishers are demanding a Christmas book. A usually jolly and kind man, Dickens becomes a morose grump searching for a muse when he stumbles on inspiration.
Ebenezer Scrooge’s journey is paralleled with Charles Dickens’ character development throughout the plot of Mr. Dickens and His Carol. It’s a sweet story full of Christmas spirit and a little mystery. Silva gets three points for using “defenestration” in a sentence – not a word that normally comes up.
The style can be a little much for the story. Silva has a tendency to become overly descriptive in an attempt to mimic the real Dickens but with less success. When Silva is not decorating the page with her verbosity, she tells a pretty good story about Dickens’ internal struggle to be a good father, husband, citizen, and writer while not giving in to the whims of publishing or depression. The character development is solid and interesting if not predictable.
Mr. Dickens and His Carol is a great easy read for the whole family this Christmas season. It will warm the heart and make you wish you could be in London listening to the real Dickens tell his carol.
Memorable Quotes “His father was north of sixty, but by temperament still a good deal south of death.” “He knew that every person was a fiery furnace of passions and attachments, unknown to every other.”
I work from home. When we moved into our bigger apartment, I knew I needed an office because it’s hard to motivate yourself to work when your office is your bed. We moved into a three bedroom apartment, and I monopolized the smallest of the three bedrooms for my office because I liked the bay window. At the time, my bookshelves took up one wall; otherwise, it was empty.
The first thing I bought was a desk so I didn’t have to sit on the ground. The criteria: no drawers. Drawers are distracting junk collectors. Next, was a big calendar white board for me to plan my non-existent social life and all my work projects.
My office is my favorite room in the house. I spend more time in my office than I spend literally anywhere else. I wake up, take the dog out, make a pot of tea, and start reading in my office for an hour before I start working. There are days, like today, I spend more than fifteen hours working in my office. It needs to be homey, comfy, and a reflection of me from the look, to the smell, to the feel, to the comfort. I want to walk in and be happy. My office isn’t perfect yet, but it’s damn close. There are a few more things on my list to make my office perfect. The biggest and most expensive purchase was the latest.
I have had a papasan since my 22 birthday. I love it, but it’s not conducive to work or reading with a 60 pound Beau in my lap. I’ve been wanting an oversized armchair for awhile, but they’re not cheap, and I had a very specific thing in mind. I had been eyeing an oversized chair recently that wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it was as close as I’m likely to get on my budget. Two weeks ago, we bought it.
I bought the chair for me, but Beau has monopolized it. The moment it was set up in my office, Beau started dogging it up. She has a memory foam dog bed next to my desk. Now as I type away at my desk, she stares at me from my chair. She loves it so much, she hangs out in it while she’s home alone. I like to think it’s a testament to how cozy and me-like my office is. It’s probably just the chair. We can easily sit side by side in it or curled up together.
I didn’t think my office could get any better, but I guess it can. The chair has made me very happy and even more productive. Maybe more importantly, it has made Beau’s life happier. She has less anxiety when we leave her home alone, and she’s as happy as happy can be curled up while I work.
bisous und обьятий, RaeAnna
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