Christmas Chez Garter was jolly, heralded by rumpusing canines, much cookie baking (I went with these recipes in the end), and cute cousins in StarWars hats:

Yes, even too-small StarWars Hat the First made an appearance on a smaller head! Pardon the bleached appearance of this picture – something unfortunate happened to the reds in the transfer to the web. Rest assured that my cousins are healthy and beautiful boys, and are not kept in a damp cave pining for sunlight.

Presents were exchanged. (Much coveted Blue Faced Leicester wool was received. I shall endeavor to show you in the next few days, as I don’t think I can resist knitting a swatch right away.) In the midst of the unwrappings, I glanced out the window and — mirabile dictu! — it was snowing. Great fleecy flakes were fairly cascading out of the heavens. I had to stare in stupid wonder for a minute to be sure I wasn’t imagining them before I shot out of my chair shrieking like any six-year-old. It didn’t stick, but it felt like a benediction.

And the handknits were a hit. But does anyone else suffer acute camnesia when racing to finish holiday knits? I seem to have a terminal case. Marika’s Christmas in Tallinn stocking came out beautifully, but I did not take a picture. Asa loved his Elizabeth Zimmermann garter-stitch slippers from Knitting Without Tears (knit in chunky-weight wool on 5.0mm needles for a kid’s size 7 – they’d be a perfect accessory to go with a Tomten or Baby Surprise Jacket, by the way), exclaiming happily, “These are my ice skates!” and sliding all over the hardwood floors. But they were captured only by chance, and quite unrecognizably, in the corner of the picture above. I made another bias garter hat for my neighbor, this time in ShibuiKnits Merino Kid in Rapids and Colinette Parisienne in Castagna, but I did not photograph it before I gave it to her.

Since I have no pictures, I offer instead my Christmas dinner recipe for vegetarian Yorkshire pudding. We went to Britain when I was thirteen to visit the great-aunts and see the sights. Dining mostly in pubs, my brother and I subsisted largely on pasties and Yorkshire pudding. (Also there was this drink I loved. I believe it was made of lemon and barley water. One day I’ll find it again.) Having been vegetarian these twelve years past, I’ve never tried to cook any of it. I recently decided that a mushroom reduction could stand in pretty well for the roast beef drippings, so on the 25th I followed this recipe for the pudding (I couldn’t resist a name like Ishbel), using butter for the fat, and Marika and I improvised the following:

In plenty of butter, sautee 1 1/2 lbs. chopped mushrooms, mixed portobello and button. Add a splash of red wine as the mushrooms begin to cook down. Throw in some finely chopped herbs – we used fresh thyme and rosemary. Stir a little cornstarch into half a cup of hot water or broth to dissolve, then add another half cup of broth or milk. Pour the lot in with the cooking mushrooms to thicken up the juices. Cook until you like the consistency. If you haven’t used a commercial vegetable or mushroom broth, you’ll probably want to add a little salt. Spoon over squares of the pudding and eat it hot.

You could make the whole thing vegan by using oil or vegetable shortening in the pudding, and then oil in the mushrooms. It would be just as tasty.

I’m up at my old island home now, editing reports for school and writing thank-you notes and a New Year’s letter and knitting and dog-wrangling. I’ve finally picked up the cashmere stole again – only five months until the wedding! – and worked most of a chart repetition last night while watching Ratatouille and a couple of West Wing episodes from Season 2. And there’s another Drifting Pleats scarf on the needles, commissioned by a friend for his lady love. Pictures soon, I promise!

Drifting Pleats scarf: winging its way across the country.

Christmas in Tallinn stocking: blocking in the tub.

Two pairs of No-Frills Fingerless Mitts: one wrapped and delivered; one awaiting a little fix on a thumb. (Okay, by “little fix” I mean an acceptance that I really did run out of yarn five rounds shy on the last of the four mitts, and that the giftee won’t mind if I substitute a different but related color rather than buying another skein of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Worsted, and that I know perfectly well that using a mismatched yarn is a better idea than clipping off all the extra inches on all the tails and trying to join them together in a yarn I can’t spit splice.) I’m pretty sure neither of those recipients is interested in knitting enough to read here, so I’ll risk a picture or three:

(No-Frills Mitts from The Knitting Man(ual), fingerless iteration. LLSW colorway: Baltic Sea – one of my favorites. Prop Master: Mr. Garter. Black and white shot included for extra manliness.) I was only planning to make one pair, and even that was an eleventh-hour addition to the knitting roster when I realized it was my friend Linus’s birthday and he needed some cheering up to offset the sad demise of his ancient VW van and his motorbike in the same week. But they went so fast! And they’re so manly! They’re too big for Mr. G, but all the same he kept borrowing that first pair: a clear sign that a handknit is a winner.

Bias Garter Hat the Second: on the needles as of last night.

Tomtenish Zimmermann slippers: one to be unsewn and made slightly longer; the second requiring three episodes of The West Wing (I never get tired of watching the first three seasons and pining after the fake government of my dreams), or maybe the first disc of Pride and Prejudice.

Stealth husband knit, not to be named: drying in a most interesting manner involving a hammer and the dehumidifier in the stock room at Knit/Purl, the only place I could be sure he wouldn’t open a closet door and find it. And I had my doubts about doubled worsted really drying in a closet anyway.

Today my parents and their dog and my Christmas tree all drive down together from the island, my brother and his lady fly in from New York, and then the flurry of holiday visits and cooking and baking and singing and rumpusing begins in earnest. I’ve been downloading every cookie recipe recommended on every blog I read. I’ve plotted my early morning assault on the grocery store for supplies. I’ve swept up the carpet of wood splinters all over the house that used to be our firewood before the dog moved in. (The remaining kindling looks like it’s been worked over by drunken ineffectual beavers, but I figure it will burn as well as ever on Christmas Eve.) So for now, I’ll leave you with a short list of dorky Christmas facts about me, as long as you promise to reply in kind in the comments.

1. By the age of three, I could sing all the verses of the little-known carol “The Snow Lay on the Ground,” complete with Latin chorus. (I’m not sure I remember all of them today.)

2. I also know the French version of “O Holy Night.” And I’ll maintain that it’s more beautiful in French.

3. My family doesn’t believe in simply barber-poling the lights around the tree like everyone else. We prefer to spend forty-five minutes cantilevered off a stepladder, anally outlining prominent branches in a pleasing architectural manner. For this reason, we also prefer the quirky misshapen natural trees over the carefully molded bottle-brush varieties available commercially.

4. We didn’t leave cookies out for Santa. Because even fictional people ought to adhere to a nutritious diet of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. He usually got a couple of satsuma oranges. And he always took time to write a thank-you note.

5. It feels a lot more like Christmas Eve if we read aloud Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. My dad does it really well.

6. No presents are opened until everyone is equipped with a pad of paper and a writing implement with which to log their booty and the folks to be thanked for it.

7. We carefully fold up and reuse our wrapping paper. Seriously, some of the sturdier sheets in the useful sizes have probably served six or eight seasons, plus birthdays if they aren’t overtly holiday themed. Needless to say, we frown mightily upon the wanton use of Scotch tape. It was a matter of family awe and pride that my late grandfather could wrap a present with no tape at all, just precision folding and well-judged ribbon placement. Legendary skills, I’m telling you. He’d also make sure everyone was issued a thoroughly antiquated but perfectly maintained pocket knife to slit any unavoidable tape with minimal marring of the paper. There was also this doctrine about using the oils from the sides of your nose as the best possible conditioner for knife blades, but I digress (and di-gross). Anyway, I like to think that I come by my oddities honestly.

Okay, your turn. Show me the dorky holiday traditions and quirks. I know you’ve got ’em.

The other night I dragged myself up to bed, feeling good about the progress I had just made on the Christmas knitting. There was the husband, all tucked in, reading about the financial situation at Singapore investment firms. (Yeah, it would put me to sleep, too.) I noticed he looked vaguely guilty. There was a studied air to his casual flipping of the pages. Then the blanket wriggled and I realized why:

Discipline has clearly gone to the dogs. And I have been supplanted. He denies it, but I swear he said, “Come on, girlfriend,” to the dog when he took her outside last evening.

Nobody here looks pleased with himself.

(And don’t worry, responsible pet owners. We don’t actually let her sleep with us. This was a one-time, invitation only, special privilege thing.)

Many of you know I used to edit children’s books for a living. It was work I mostly loved, and it carved my affection for children’s literature into a lasting passion. That means I’m snobby about the quality of books: of course I want kids to fall for reading, and if that means they devour a lot of trash on their way to the good stuff, so be it. But I hope they’ll develop palates discerning enough to tell the difference and appreciate well-written, thoughtful books with something worthy at the core. I want those stories and their characters to live on in children’s imaginations after the last page is turned. And I jealously guard my own experiences of good books.

So I greet the current parade of adaptations for the big screen with a healthy dose of distrust and chagrin. The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter seem to have inaugurated a veritable gold rush to mine the children’s literature canon for blockbusters. When the former head of Dutton Children’s Books made the decision to sell merchandising rights to Winnie the Pooh, he privately referred to it as the Rape of Pooh. I can’t help but see a Rape of Children’s Classics underway. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Bridge to Terabithia, Charlotte’s Web. I can hardly bear to mention The Polar Express. And according to the previews, they’re plowing through the contemporary best-sellers next: Inkheart is next on the block, and there were posters for The Spiderwick Chronicles all over the theatre. This is not to say that good movies can’t be and haven’t been made from children’s books. (I’ll skip, for now, the tangential argument that having the experience handed to you visually is far less fulfilling than animating the story yourself as you read.) But too many attempts to capture the worlds and characters that live in our hearts fall desperately flat, and I’m afraid I have to pronounce The Golden Compass just such an effort.

I probably should have known better. It lured me with its fine cast and promising visuals. I love the story, and I wanted to see if Hollywood had taken the care to do it right. They didn’t. The directing, screenwriting, and editing are poor. I’m not sure I’d have been able to follow the story at all if I didn’t know the book. It’s choppy; it’s a madcap dash from one plot point to the next in order to squash the tale into feature length. Countless subtleties that slowly dawn on you in the book are dumped out in expository dialogue like Spam from a tin. The CG isn’t convincing except in a few scenes (the bear fight, notably, and for some reason the forms of transportation) where they clearly spent the extra money to dazzle us. And the movie isn’t convincing, either. Mostly, it’s just frustrating. You catch glimpses of what it could have been: Lee and Hester are pitch perfect, Fra Pavel is unctuous and creepy, Lyra is forthright and brave and doesn’t overact, Lord Asriel is suitably haughty, Serafina Pekkala is luscious and otherworldly (and boy can she fight without mussing her hair). Nicole Kidman is a reasonably good Mrs. Coulter, although she looks disconcertingly like Renee Zellweger in many of her costumes. Unfortunately, the golden monkey is such a lousy piece of digital work that I was distracted from her performance.

So what’s the silver lining of two wasted hours? Peter Jackson just keeps looking better and better. I may have to do my evening cashmere lace knitting to one of the Lord of the Rings movies.

P.S. If you’re set on seeing The Golden Compass despite my warnings, at least do yourself the favor of sprinting from the theatre as Lee’s balloon sails off into the sunset after the fight at Bolvangar (yes, that’s really where the film ends), before the soul-sucking treacle of the Original Song oozes stickily over the credits. It’s quite honestly the worst piece of music I’ve heard in years. My ears and stomach have not yet recovered.