When I was a little girl, I remember bringing the Christmas tree into the house on Christmas Eve and leaving it completely bare for Santa to decorate.  When it was time for bed, and bedtime always seemed to come extra early on this night, we would scurry around, looking for the biggest stocking we could find to leave out on the back of the couch – we didn't have a fireplace to hang it on - in hopes that we would find it filled to the brim with treats from Santa in the morning.  Not everyone remembers that there was a time that we actually used a sock from our drawer.  This was a really long time ago, before the cute homemade stockings or darling store-bought ones that we have now.  It was hard to get to sleep on Christmas Eve and I never remember dreaming about sugar plums, but they were sweet dreams nonetheless.  In the morning, as we crept down the hall to the living room, we would come upon a wonderful, magical sight…the bare tree had been transformed and was beautifully ornamented.  The colored lights were glimmering in the early morning darkness.  The experience was quite miraculous, especially since "Santa" had so many children to take care of.  I never doubted his ability to accomplish the tasks.  I was sure that every child would have an equally wonderful experience.  I don't recall exactly when the changes came, but the

It is cold, no freezing outside!  When you live in San Diego, that's a true sign that winter is here.  By mid-day, it will be delightfully warm outside in the sunshine, but in my house, it definitely feels like winter.  That…and the fact that it's DECEMBER 1st and I haven't started decorating for Christmas yet can cause a good deal of panic at my house!  When I presented the idea of getting down the Christmas boxes from the attic shelf in the garage last night, my dear husband suggested that getting the laundry done first might be wise – I don't know…maybe because he needs to put the ladder somewhere!  So this morning, laundry is going full blast, next comes the dusting and cleaning, so that when he gets home this afternoon, there will be no excuses!  It is so much work to set it up that we like to have it around for at least the whole month of December, and frequently keep it around until the first full week of January is over. Along with the cold weather and decorating, the Christmas season brings lots of handmade crafts, goodies and gifts.  I am attempting to actually handcraft a pile of gifts  this year and there are always things that get in the way.  But if I do one or two things a day, I can accumulate quite a stash.  Here are a couple of cards

I love alphabets…big ones, little ones, cursive, typewriter, bold, epoxy, chipboard, stickers…I love the element that stickers add to paper projects.  Unfortunately, I am always running out of certain letters.  It just happens.  This is my solution.  Anyone can do their own, but I like working on them in Adobe Illustrator because I can adjust size and change the fonts easily.  You can make them in any basic word processing program, but if you'd like it to be easy, you can download them and print them.  Try one, and if you like them, print them on different colors of cardstock.  It makes for a cheap filler for missing letters, or just use them all by themselves. For storage, I cut them vertically in half, eyeballing where the best middle is.  Then I cut them, with scissors, in between the different rows.  This way you can easily cut off the letters you need when you need them.  Don't worry about keeping the sides totally straight.  I like them random!  Here is a card that I made with the letters. Sometimes I like to mix up the upper and lower case letters in other than the grammatically correct pattern!  Have fun and if you like them, let me know and maybe I'll make more for you to download and use!  Download alphabet.pdf (1738.1K)