My Handsome Assistant and I like to go cabin camping in winter. Rates are usually lower, things are less crowded, he’s got PTO to use up (or else lose), and there isn’t usually much else to do. A change of scenery does us both good, even if it’s only for a couple of days. It’s also nice to experience the time around the solstice like this.
(We half-jokingly say it’s glamping, because there’s a shower, sheets, heating, and a mini-fridge. Either way, it’s nice and I much prefer it to most of the hotels I’ve been to.) (Even the fancy ones.)
However, while we anticipated a possibly-snowy getaway/creative retreat to work on music, fiction writing, and so on, what we got was… 60° F (15.5° C) and a meteor shower.
Did any of yas know there was a meteor shower? I didn’t. The only ones I usually pay attention to are the ones that occur over the summer here, like your Delta Aquarids and Perseids, and I have been Missing. Out.
I only realized when I was sitting in bed one night, drinking tea and looking out at the forest through the window, all cozy and idyllic and junk. An object, about as large and bright as the brightest star in the sky, flared to life, moved across the sky, and disappeared. I was, of course, surprised — a shooting star without a tail? A “drone” with an oddly predictable flight pattern and only one light? A hallucination?
As it turns out, it was most likely part of the Quaternid meteor shower. This one is, apparently, often overlooked. It has a short period of peak activity and happens in late December/early January, so most people miss it. Also, the Quaternid meteors usually don’t have long tails. They do, however, produce some very bright, striking fireballs. So that was neat.
The next day, we spent the late morning going for a walk. With the weather as strangely warm as it was, it turned out to be ideal conditions for finding some very interesting specimens of fungi and beautiful colonies of lichen and moss.
Unfortunately for me, most common culinary species of mushrooms and boletes make me very ill. (Oyster mushrooms, why won’t you let me love you?!) I also have only a passing interest in identifying them, since my interest is primarily visual.
It has been years, but I am still inordinately proud of this very, very silly picture.
I’m what you might call an amateur “catch and release” forager. I love looking at them. I love their folklore. I love finding them. I love taking pictures of them. Sometimes, I’m even able to identify them. I get really stoked when I find ones that a) I recognize, b) are useful, and c) won’t try to make me yakk everything I’ve eaten since fourth grade. But that’s neither here nor there.
Look! We found cool mushrooms and assorted other little forest buddies!
I don’t care how common moss, lichen, and little beige mushrooms are, I will be excited about them absolutely every time. Like a person calling their spouse over every time their cat does something adorable, I will never not be endlessly delighted by them whenever I see them.
A cluster of what are most likely stump puffballs (Lycoperdon pyriforme).Likely white cheese polypore (Tyromyces chioneus).A cluster of what’s most likely one of the Stereum species.No idea what these are, but I love this photo.
I don’t even need to know what kind they are, I’m just happy to have them around.
Here’s hoping your days are similarly filled with interesting small things.
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For many of us, the winter holidays are a time for gift-giving — especially in the US. Even people who aren’t Christian may celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday, focused around getting together with close friends and family, eating delicious food, and exchanging gifts. For some Pagans, Yule is an opportunity to exchange gifts as a small-scale representation of the communal spirit necessary to make it through the dark, cold winter months.
If you’re like me, you’re probably into reskilling. This past year, I’ve taken up small sewing projects, Nuno felting, making herbal tinctures and smoking blends, and growing fruit. My Handsome Assistant makes his own mead and melomel. These things have given us tangible things and skills to share within our community, and they’re fun. For real. There’s an enormous sense of accomplishment that comes with being able to go outside, pick breakfast from vines you’ve grown, then turn the leaves into useful medicine.
This year, Etsy put out their Holiday Hub with a great selection of gifts for everyone, at all price points. I thought I’d make my own list of suggestions focused around cute kits and fun gifts for reskilling.
This year, my Handsome Assistant has gotten into whittling (with a gorgeous handmade knife he purchased during Pagan Pride Day). Right now, he mostly strips the bark from branches so I can use them for making other things. When he wants to move on to making his own projects, I plan on getting him this kit from ButternutSpoonCarver — it comes with everything you need to carve a wooden spoon, which is a great project for beginners.
This knife kit from RazorbackBladeworks contains everything you need to make an 8″ Damascus steel knife, including rosewood scales, brass pins, and a leather sheath. It’s a really nice kit for the person in your life who a) has everything, or b) is very into knives. (It’s me, I’m b.)
This makes a full-tang knife, so it’ll be as durable as it is beautiful and useful.
Nuno felting is a ton of fun. Using this kit, I started with a length of silk and some wisps of wool, and, after rolling a soapy pool noodle around my kitchen for a bit, have a gorgeous scarf in my favorite colors. It’s a project I definitely want to tackle again — I’d love to use this technique for arm warmers, vests, shawls, you name it. Next, I’d like to give this Nuno felt vest kit a try.
If you’re not familiar with Nuno felting, it’s a technique that involves felting wool roving onto a fabric backing. It’s easy, beautiful, and very satisfying. If knitting or crocheting aren’t quite your bag, but you’d still like to get into fiber arts, give it a try! These kits from EsthersPlaceonEtsy and SurigirlFibers make it easy.
Solar printing uses light from the sun to trigger a reaction, creating a vivid blue and white silhouette of whatever objects you’d like to use. It’s commonly used for creating interesting botanical art by laying leaves and flowers down on the paper before exposing it to sunlight.
This usually involves working with potentially dangerous chemicals, but this kit by ElementalLeaf makes it easy and less messy. It comes with pre-treated paper that you expose to sunlight and process in plain water, but gives you the same stunning results as traditional cyanotype methods.
Have you seen flower dyeing? This is a process that uses the natural pigments in flowers to create a unique, beautiful, almost tie-dye-like pattern on fabric. The flowers are simply placed on the fabric, then wrapped up and steamed.
While fresh flowers for dyeing are in short supply in temperate areas during winter, this kit comes with everything that you need to create a one-of-a-kind scarf from these completely natural materials. The scarf itself has also been pre-treated with a mordant, so the colors in your finished project will last.
Biophilic design isn’t just a fad. As it turns out, living in spaces with natural materials and live plants is better for our physical and mental health. This kit allows you to bring more nature into your home, without the struggle of keeping live moss.
It comes with a frame and a variety of preserved moss, so your finished project will last and stay looking good. It’s a great project to introduce the concepts behind creating living moss art and terraria, and also allows you to liven up spaces that may not be conducive to keeping living plants. Since this project is pretty simple, it’s also good for teens and supervised children.
Candle making is a pretty classic winter activity. With relatively little labor, you can create your own candles to bring light, warmth, and cheer into your home. It doesn’t take a lot of specialized knowledge or supplies, either, so it’s a great activity to do as a family.
This kit uses non-toxic soy wax and natural fragrances and contains enough for two candles. Everything is pre-measured and ready to go.
I have really fond memories of making linocut prints in art class as a kid. This kit contains everything you need to do the same — soft linoleum blocks, knives, ink, and even blank greeting cards. Purchase it early, and you can make your own holiday cards!
Once your linocut blocks are made, you can use them over and over again on paper, fabric, you name it. Use a variety of colored inks, or even multiple blocks layered on the same piece to create stunning artwork. This kit is a great introduction to printmaking.
When I was little, my grandma taught me a very basic crochet stitch. I’ve been wanting to pick up more, and this kit is going to be my gateway into actually crocheting things.
It comes with everything you need to make a cute beanie — yarn, a hook, instructions, and even access to a YouTube tutorial. It’s a very easy project, suitable for ages 10 and up, but the results are pretty impressive. Best of all, once you have this simple technique down, you can make all the beanies you want to wear, give away, or even donate.
Watercolor is one of those skills that anyone can pick up but takes some bravery to get into. It doesn’t erase like pencil, so it teaches us to embrace whatever “mistakes” we make and weave them into the final vision. Like Bob Ross said, “we don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.”
This kit contains everything needed to make beautiful beetle art. It has sheets of watercolor paints in brilliant colors, a reusable water pen, inspiration images, and pre-printed beetles to paint.
Winter is a great time to hang out and focus on building new skills. If you’re looking for a new hobby to take up or just need a gift for someone who’s difficult to buy for, these DIY kits may be just the answer you need. You or your giftee can learn things, sharpen your skills, and maybe discover a brand-new passion.
When I was little, my dad (whose cooking repertoire largely consisted of pancakes and frybread) would get these boxes of premade sugar cookies with printed reindeer, Santa, and snowflake designs, and little tubes of icing. We’d spend an afternoon decorating them and, even if the cookies themselves were always kind of stale, it’s a memory I look back on fondly. We also made snowman ornaments out of wire and beads, and all kinds of stuff. My dad was always pretty good at extracurricular tiny child-type activities.
I was pretty surprised to hear that my partner had never decorated cookies for the Yuletide season before. I’d never made a gingerbread cookie from scratch in my life, but I like experimenting. So, armed with Kanan Patel’s eggless gingerbread cookie recipe from Spice Up the Curry, I set out to make us some gingerbread men.
There was only one problem. Seeing as how I’d never baked a gingerbread man before, I didn’t have any people-shaped cookie cutters. I also wasn’t about to individually freehand a troupe of gingerpeople.
So we made gingercryptids instead.
Raw dough, before trimming and chilling.
Honestly, the cookie recipe was perfect. I used einkorn flour, and didn’t have to make any adjustments to get cookies that were crispy outside, chewy inside, and substantial enough to hold up to a whole lot of decorations. The dough started out crumbly, coming together after the butter managed to melt a little. The cookie cutters are from Kato Baking Supplies on Etsy. They’re actually for fondant, but, with the exception of losing an odd chupacabra spike or two, worked out just fine. We chilled the dough, rolled it out, cut the shapes, preheated the oven while we chilled the shapes again, and they didn’t spread at all. Perfect!
(Featuring Salaryman Chupacabra, Ugly Sweater Nightcrawler, and Sprinkle Hotpants Nightcrawler.)
This past Sunday, one of my Meetup groups had a meeting to discuss Dana O’Driscoll‘s Sacred Actions: Living the Wheel of the Year through Earth-Centered Sustainable Practices. Luckily for me, I’d picked up a copy several months ago from Three Witches’ Tea Shop. It’d been in my “to read” pile for a bit, so I was very happy to have the extra encouragement to get into it.
We went over the first high day, Yule. For this time of year, Sacred Actions emphasizes learning one’s place in the consumption web of life — observing your consumption patterns, seeing how you can live in a way that’s more regenerative and nurturing for the Earth and other people, and learning to discern between a need and a want so that there are enough resources for everyone to live comfortably.
This chapter also encourages the reader to take a look at their ecological impact using the Footprint Calculator quiz. Mine came out at a 1.8 — meaning that, if everyone in the world lived like I do, it would take 1.8 Earths to sustain us all. Unfortunately, this number is actually at the lower end of the spectrum, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
The discussion was lively and fruitful. It was nice to know that we were all in a similar place — aware of tactics like “greenwashing” and propaganda that emphasizes individual responsibility over corporate abuses, and knowing exactly how difficult it is to engage in ethical consumption within our economic system.
One thing I particularly liked was O’Driscoll’s emphasis on regeneration and nurturing over sustainability. Sustainability is nice, but comes with a pretty heavy subtext. The implication is that we should find a way to do things that allows us to continue to live, consume, and behave in the way to which we’ve become accustomed. This isn’t just impossible, it’s not exactly a noble goal. Instead, we should work toward regeneration — giving back to the planet and exploited people to replace what has already been depleted.
(I could go into a super long and weird discussion about extinct megafauna, human cities, and the importance of poo here, but I will spare you this. Instead, here is a giant gorilla fighting a t-rex:)
The idea that we have a responsibility to more than just the planet was refreshing, too. My ecological footprint is low for someone living in a wealthy, developed nation. I’m not bragging here — the reason it’s low is that disability (and, let’s be real, an at times paralytically rigid sense of ethics) keeps me from engaging much in many aspects of society. The things that make my footprint as large as it is aren’t even things I can control. It’s almost all the snowball effect of having a long, multinational supply chain.
With that in mind, there’s only so much else I can trim. It’s frustrating to look for ways to make your lifestyle more sustainable (read: regenerative), and just get the same bits of advice over and over and over again. Use reusable paper products. (Check.) Use metal straws. (Check.) Compost. (Check.) Instead of this, O’Driscoll’s work provides some other lenses through which to consider sustainability. Even if I can’t change the supply chain that delivers the things I need, I can focus my energy on supporting, regenerating, and nurturing the people involved.
(Incidentally, I think I’ve begun to hate the word “nurturing.” I’ve seen it co-opted so many times by new-agey wellness articles about consumerist self-care strategies, I think they’ve ruined it for me. I will, however, continue to use it here for lack of a better term.)
(The phrase “nurturing the people involved” also gives me mental images of someone breastfeeding a forklift operator, but I’m not sure how else to say it. Your mileage will hopefully vary.)
The next step is to engage with the exercises. This means placing one of three ideas at the forefront of my mind for a week at a time. First, emphasizing care for the Earth and all of its inhabitants. Next, will be emphasizing people. After that, ensuring that there is enough for all.
As I write this, news stations are broadcasting about the deaths of workers in an Amazon warehouse that was hit by a tornado. The tornado wasn’t a surprise. People, driven by desperation, went to work. The company higher-ups didn’t see fit to let them stay home. Jeff Bezos says he’s heartbroken about the tragedy, but has yet to commit any actual money to providing for the families of the dead.
In the meantime, Bezos’ Earth Fund has also committed another $443M (USD) to conservation efforts, or roughly 1/500th of his net worth. A net worth that comprises assets gained through exploiting people and the planet.
His attitude and position is not unique. Remember, while you make adjustments to your lifestyle, that the people serving as conduits for environmental and human exploitation are not gods. They have names and addresses. When living sustainably as an individual only goes so far, there is always direct action.
As it turns out, there’s a buttload more to working from home than setting up a desk.
I think neither my partner nor I would’ve been able to predict the effects it had: worse sleep hygiene, confused cats, a general air of unease, a much harder time separating work and life, working an extra three hours or so a day. The trouble is, if you have to work from home, you don’t get much choice in the matter — you either have a separate space for an office and the kind of mental walls that help you keep your work life and home life separate, or you’re kind of boned.
So we engineered a way to take a vacation in the most low-risk, isolated way possible.
Getaway offers tiny cabins a little less than two hours outside of D.C. It worked out perfect for us — we booked and paid for the cabin online a few months in advance (they fill up quick), picked up some extra provisions during our last grocery trip, filled up on gas when we normally would anyhow, and made the trip without having to stop. Checking in was completely contactless, too. We received a text with the lock code, keyed it in to the number pad on the door, and stepped into a very comfy, charming one-room cabin.
It was pretty much perfect. There was a spacious bathroom at one end, with a large shower and accessibility bars. At the other, there was a big, marshmallowy queen sized bed under an enormous window that looked out onto the woods. The cabin also had a pretty well-equipped kitchen, with a two burner stove, sink, pots, pans, silverware, and dishes. (There was even a bowl for traveling dogs.)
It snowed pretty heavily, which kept us from really taking advantage of the trails or the fire pit. Even so, it was really wonderful being able to snuggle up in bed with a cup of tea and some pancakes, under that huge window, and watch the snow through the trees. The night sky was gorgeous, too — I stayed up late both nights to stargaze.
It was just cozy, you know? Peaceful. Idyllic. No work emails, no calls, no wifi to answer them even if we wanted to. Just the creaking of the trees in the wind, snow, and the stars at night.
It turned out to be a great atmosphere for brainstorming, too. My S.O. and I did some storyboarding, and he wrote a really awesome short story (that will hopefully go up somewhere in the future). I had about a thousand ideas, but didn’t really get into writing or making art while I was there — I took a few notes and made some sketches, but I didn’t want to lose too much time trancing out in a creativity fugue like usual.
Even the way home was pretty. It rained after it snowed, and the nighttime temperature drop made the water freeze around all of the bare trees until it looked like they were covered in diamonds. The sky was blue, and the sun glittered through the trees’ ice-covered claws until even an ordinary road next to a set of power lines looked like something out of Narnia.
Everything was so bright and pretty, in fact, and we felt so refreshed, that we didn’t really want to go home right away. Stopping somewhere populated wasn’t really an option, but that’s okay.
There’re always roadside attractions.
We’re both kind of suckers for them (by which I mean that, if there’s a World’s Largest Something between here and California, we’ve probably stopped by). The biggest windchime? Been there, rang it, had a slice of pie. My S.O. had barely opened his mouth to say he wished there was something cool on the way home before I had a list of things that were a) large, b) unpopulated, and c) at least slightly ridiculous.
And that’s how we found a giant nutcracker. (Well, mostly the head.)
He used to be a paving company’s tar silo. When a paint company bought the property, they painted it and converted it to this fellow. Honestly, the setting had a pretty unique sense of melancholy — there he was, with the approaching clouds just beginning to gray the sky, strewn with unlit Christmas lights, staring unblinkingly out at a McDonald’s across the street. It felt very Lynchian, though I’ll be damned if I can explain how.
Our appetites whetted by the urge to see more huge things, we next drove back to D.C. to find an actual giant.
Fortunately, it being the middle of the week, during a pandemic, and also December, the place was pretty much deserted. Several areas were closed off, so I wasn’t able to get closer to the sculptures themselves, but the image was still very striking. There he was, this metal titan struggling up from the beach sand, face twisted in anguished effort. Then, in the background, a lazily turning Ferris wheel.
I don’t know if any of you have played Kenshi, but there’s one particular area that gives me a similar feeling. There’s just something about massive metal hands clawing vainly at the sky that’s so damn eerie. When it’s juxtaposed against a beach and a carnival ride, it’s surreal as hell. I love it.
Now we’re home, snuggled up with two cats who had Many Things to Say about our absence. If you’re reading this the day it was posted, it’s the winter solstice. Keep your eyes peeled tonight for the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, and have a happy Yule.
Marble Crow 