christmas to do...

there is nothing like a good ol' dose of christmas to get you out of a gloomy funk, and this year the thorburn family is REALLY excited for christmas! well- finn and i are... jeff goes along with all our crazy ideas.

all my life i have been a huge christmas celebrator. i love the traditions and decorating and baking and family and making everything (perhaps a bit overly) meaningful. this year will actually be our first ever christmas just the three of us. we are heading to calgary on the 27th, but never in the 12+ years jeff and i have been together have we ever officially spent the entire day without chunks of extended family. as someone who very much loves a full house, i'm a bit mixed on my feelings about it, but i am really excited to make it a special day and do a few things we might not normally do (like, we might GO OUT for christmas dinner instead of making a big feast! gasp!)

it's probably no surprise that i have spent more than a few hours rummaging through pinterest finding ALL the things that i'm certain will make this christmas just right. and how unfun would it be if i wasn't overindulgent in my sharing of these ambitious projects?

so, here are a few of my favourite things found floating around the internet time will tell if any of them actually come to fruition.

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i'm super late in getting a wreath made for our front door this year. if i'm being honest, i still have a stack of slowly rotting pumpkins waiting to be composted. but i've always loved the simplicity of wreaths like the one above. and i could likely forage for the needed supplies in our yard. (though i probably should have done this yesterday when the sun was shining.)

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i stumbled upon a rather large bag of very old cinnamon in my cupboard recently (i'm still totally stumped by where it actually came from...), and deemed it the perfect excuse to make these cinnamon ornaments. i remember having them on our tree as a kid, and each year eagerly inhaling all their sweet cinnamony goodness as we unpacked the ornament box.

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i for some reason cant stop buying cheese. we don't even really eat that much cheese these days, but every trip the grocery store has me coming home with various cheese options. i keep thinking it will be good to have for when people pop by, but so far, i have just eaten most of it. (hey man, half a block of fried halloumi totally counts as dinner!) i did however pick up some imperial cheese the other day with full intentions of making these cocktail crisps that my friend anna shared on my 12 days of baking feature last year. that is assuming i don't eat all the cheese first.

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each year, finn and i pick an ornament project that we make together. this year, we decided on some variation of a pinecone elf. i like the sweet little faces on these guys.

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my friend katie and i have been daydreaming over these momofuko cornflake, marshmallow and chocolate chip cookies. it's an involved recipe with many steps, but we have agreed to tackle it together. it will also probably help us to SHARE a recipe rather than having the whole batch to ourselves. ;)

december 1

today would have been eli's due date.

it's a day i have reluctantly anticipated- obviously full of sorrow and tender emotions. my heart, which i have spent the past few months trying to piece back together, is of course, still so very broken.

since august i have thought about what this day would look like. i thought i would go to our special place at the beach and spread some of eli's ashes- a spot he could forever be with roo and i could return to whenever i needed to be with them. i thought i would go to the forest and find the most beautiful tree to place one single chrismas ornament on. something that would bring a smile to the faces of all passersby. i thought i might be able to keep it together. carry on with this day, go about it all without turning into a huge mess, but instead, i have crawled back into bed and don't know that i really want to get back out. 

perhaps though, today is the crux. that the bumps from here on out will not be as enormous as the ones previous. tomorrow, no longer will i be anticipating the day that could have been. i wont be fixated on the worry and over-thinking and unknowingness of december 1st. i'm not naive enough to think there wont still be hard days, that today is in any way the end of my journey, but i can feel a shift - like there is a rush of fresh air about to flood in, and for the first time in a long time, i am not worried about what comes next. for now, that's enough.

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the day we found out that eli could not survive, i asked jeff if he could take some photos of us at the beach. i wanted to always have a beautiful memory of the time i was given to carry him with me. jeff shot them on film and just got the negatives developed a few days ago. after he scanned them in, he had planned to edit out some of the dust spots, but i couldnt let him do it. the imperfectness of them is perfect for what these pictures mean to me