my mother told me never to swear

I realized that I left you all hanging after the last post, with visions dancing in your heads of me in the top of a pine tree somewhere, chucking gingerbread at random passersby and muttering under my breath about all the Who's down in Whoville.

In fact, this season has been relatively stress-free. The bulk of the shopping was done the first weekend in December, the Christmas photo/letters were finished the following weekend, the house is more or less decorated, gifts are wrapped, so on and so forth, and it's all thanks to this particular Christmas elf:

... who no doubt read my last post with fear and trembling in his heart. Who said blogging was a waste of time?

This of course left me with only one option: create stress entirely of my own making.

Now, I had sworn this Christmas season: No Christmas Crafting. Not one stitch. I was taking a year off from the stress and strain of trying to meet deadlines with my fingers sprained from the effort.

But then my littlest one, whom we all know I am powerless to resist, asked me to knit him an elf hat, to cement his new position in the household as chief elf. How could I say no to a specific knitted-item request? And such an easy one, too! It's not as if he asked me to knit a fair isle sweater. A few days later, I managed to churn out this:

Meathead Hat in Universal Yarns Classic Chunky

And it was so easy and so quick that we were off to the races. How could I leave his brothers out? They might think I no longer loved them, what with no hand-crafted gift under the tree. After searching for just the right items and discretely inquiring as to whether a certain 12-year-old boy would wear a hat that looked like a dead fish (he says he will; he'd better...), the current count is as follows:

One pair of fingerless gloves, the better to text people with (from a WWII-era booklet, Knitted Comforts for Soldiers adapted here);

Another Meathead Hat for my little nephew. How could I not make two more of them, with pop-top mittens to match, because the hat was so easy and quick?  Still to be done is a complementary, slightly smaller set in red for his little brother (although the mittens are already finished);

Said dead fish hat -- no picture, because it is drying out from it's first bath as I type; and

Gulp. This will be a pair of fingerless mitts by Thursday morning, for a certain first-grade teacher (again, nothing I would not do for that boy, plus this is a really special teacher).

To paraphrase the immortal words of the Blues Brothers... It's 72 hours to Christmas, I've got a full set of double pointed needles, half a pot of coffee, multiple items still left to finish, and I'm grossly underestimating the time I have available.

Knit it.