Happy New Year!

First day of 2010. Sitting here with my coffee.

I kept forgetting it was New Year's Eve last night until fireworks woke me up. A really party-er I am. We watched Up last night again, and I think it's the best movie of 2009. What movie has you sobbing, then two seconds later laughing your head off? And it's actually a movie intended for children!? But complex enough for grownups? It really is the best movie ever. Ellis calls it U-p. He spells it; it's so cute.

I've been thinking of the holidays this past week. How glad I am that Christmas was over. Me!? I love Christmas! It's my favorite. ("I like smiling. It's my favorite.") Growing up I was so susceptible to the ambiance, the music, the cookies, the snowflakes, the gift making and shopping. Christmas brought my college roommate and I together. We bonded over Christmas and became fast friends.

This year December was one long panic attack. Trying to make things, yet becoming disillusioned with Handmade Holidays at the eleventh hour, but no choice but to press on (sort of like having a baby. ha!). Counting pennies, frustrated with unexpected expenses. Trying to stay positive, focusing on what is right and good, yet, there still must be a gift to give, no matter how simple.

And Marlowe chooses this time to eschew sleeping. I think we are starting the long journey towards the cutting of incisors. The molars were conquered in November, and this is the next mountain to climb.

So a combination between sleep deprivation and trying to make at least a very simple Christmas happen left me feeling chewed up and spit out. I did not enjoy Christmas this year. There. True confession. I was happy that people liked their gifts. It made all the stress worth it. But next year, I don't care how poor we are, I'm shopping. No more Handmade Holidays until my kids are older and sleep.

People say, "oh, you don't have to do much for Christmas." I didn't. This was me already doing the bare minimum. I made peppermint bark, not cookies!

My Scrooge Tale of Woe sets me up for the New Year. It's only fitting that after a season like Christmas, our only holiday that gets a true season and not just a day, that we should all be sick of the upheaval and crave a blank slate. And then we get a New Year! How we all rejoice and make resolutions.

Exercise! Eat healthily! Read! Blog!

Yes, I hope to turn over a new leaf in all those areas. But I realize that when you have little kids sometimes things just don't go as planned, and you just have to make a new plan. One that involves a little more mess, and a little more time to do things.

BUT

I'm totally digressing from what I intended to write in this blog post, which was to tell you about my new books as avenue for the New Years Blank Slate Thrill Ride, otherwise known as New Years Resolution. So setting the existential rabbit trail aside:

* Someone very close to me got me two books that I have wanted for years but have been out-of-print/hard-to-find. The first is Umberto Eco's Experiences in Translation. I'm not a huge fan of translating, and I don't think I have a particular knack for it either. But I get along okay when I need to do it, and seem to find myself in research projects that require a lot of it. Or at least I used to, since I haven't done much scholarly work recently. This is something that I resolve to change this year. I want to submit a journal article and to apply to grad school to finish my PhD.

The second of the books in the Highly Prized category is a book that I have longed for. I couldn't find it in libraries, yet it was constantly being cited. Francoise Robin's La cour d'Anjou-Provence: La vie artistique sous le regne de Rene is a cultural/art history of the patronage of Rene d'Anjou, a fifteenth-century French king. I first learned about Rene when I was studying abroad in Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France, and passed his statue everyday. When I got back home to my history major, I began my obsession with all things Rene, which, of course, plunged me into fifteenth-century patronage studies and whisked me off to Burgundy. All along, I've wanted to study Rene, but have been redirected by wiser advisors who want to me get degrees. Last night I was poking around Amazon, and there seems to be a little surge in Rene studies in the Anglophone scholarly world. Can it be? Perhaps my dream dissertation may be attainable.

Lest I get carried away, though:

* I also bought my first Ina Garten cookbook. After flipping through three of them, I finally chose Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics, because it's the one that made me salivate the most. I'm picky and rarely buy a new cookbook, because I think you can find most of what you need to know on the internet. (And with an epicurious.com app, who can go wrong?) I don't need the extra clutter of too many cookbooks. But I have some friends who are Ina fans, and when they make me something from one of her recipes, I stop cold after the first bite, and must know everything about it, because it was the best ever.

Her recipe for chocolate cake that Jonesey made for our two-year-old's birthday two-and-a-half years ago is one I still remember. I don't like chocolate cake. In fact, I'd rather not eat dessert than eat chocolate cake. I simply don't like it. Jonesey made me try a bite of Ina Garten's chocolate cake. And I not only liked it, I loved it! And I'm still talking about it over two years later. So, I figured a woman of such genius to make a recipe of chocolate cake that I like is definitely a woman worth paying some extra attention to. And so far, even though I've just sat in bed and read the cookbook, I'm enjoying her immensely. I like her perspective on ingredients: fresh, quality, seasonal. And I like that the recipes are solid and have that extra something to make it unique and special. Eating well is something I take very seriously, from ingredients to the actual dish prepared, because it impacts our whole life.

* and, of course, I couldn't let my gift card go without getting this year's raddest craft book, Bend the Rules with Fabric by Amy Karol, about printing, stamping, painting, dyeing, etc with fabric. This book is going to be a lot of fun. As I've started to get into a lot of the different techniques she writes about, I'm really thankful for this resource and finding her pointers from directions to actual materials used are very helpful.

And so begins a new year of thinking, cooking, crafting.

And mothering these two...which deserves a post of its own, but can hardly be distilled to one post.