Category: Holidays (Page 11 of 13)

The Sweet Tradition of Christmas Cookies

December 27, 2010 / Katie L. Carroll

It just wouldn’t have been a complete Christmas without making cookies with the nephews and niece. I love to see the creativity come out of each of them in different ways.

(This is just a sampling of the cookies we made. I don’t think any of them are mine. I played around with different combinations of black and white frosting this year.)

My 11-year-old nephew is my writing buddy. We pack up our laptops and head out to the local cafe or Barnes & Noble and work on our projects (and eat too). He has a fast mind that’s always churning away, so he works feverishly on projects (and sometimes has trouble finishing them). He has always liked to draw figures, from baseball players to super-heroes, so it was no surprise that he turned some of the cookies into his favorite music artists.

My 5-year-old niece is a girl’s girl. She loves princesses, her favorite colors are pink and purple, and she often compliments me on a cute shirt or accessory. She is also very creative and passionate in her pursuits, especially drawing and coloring. She was the last kid standing when it came to decorating.

My 4-year-old nephew is what I like to call mechanically creative. He’s a very literal little boy, who watches and explores how things move and work. He is also super sweet and indulges his auntie when she asks for a little “sugar” (hug and kisses) or to eat his cheeks, which have the cutest dimples. He tends to be very methodical with his creations.

(From left to right: we have Squidword as made by my little nephew, a trendy snow lady complete with rosy cheeks courtesy of my niece, and Michael Jackson as envisioned by my older nephew.)

Naturally I forgot to bring my camera this year, so thanks to my mom (and here is where my brother would say, “Thanks to your mom!”) for the pictures. What are your favorite traditions?

Party Magnetic Poetry

September 14, 2010 / Katie L. Carroll

We had a little cookout and backyard fire over Labor Day weekend. My refrigerator is now kind of famous at these little shindigs because of the magnetic poetry kit.

(So this picture isn’t really from my backyard (you think!). That’s way more fires and way more people than would fit on my .2 acres. It’s from a recent trip to the WaterFire Providence.)

The party-goers were in rare form, and there was one line of poetry I’m not going to include in full…just to give you an idea of its flavor, the poet put the tiles “an” and “al” together and it also contained the tiles “long,” “green,” “pickle,” and “spurt” (somehow it always turn dirty…that’s what she said!).

i am an old bald devil dog who has a free soul and love s to eat (nice to see the old bald devil dog is enjoying life)

speak wrong mind but think from heart (ahhh…very wise, grasshopper)

pour some wine and soon you must table dance as hot as a random spider genius (the “a” tile is actually “at” with the t covered…I have such clever–and demented/drunk–guests)

if i vacuum a precious monkey chicken it will release a black bosom tremendous ly naked (well, you better not vacuum the precious monkey chicken then)

sweet night whisper e d her light poet r y to my howl ing brain (I hope the night’s poetry was better than the magnetic poetry…really, I kid because I do love it when people make poetry on my refrigerator)

Thanks to all who created a little fun on the fridge!

My Haunted Wedding Location

February 8, 2010 / Katie L. Carroll

Let’s start with a bit of a digression: links to three contests. One is to win R.J. Anderson’s book Knife over at Cindy Pon’s blog. A second contest is a book giveaway at the Class of 2k10 blog. The last is for a MG/YA agent contest over at Guide to Literary Agents. And now back to our regularly scheduled post!

The other night the hubby yelled to me from the living room, “You’ve gotta come see this!” I had just gotten out of the shower and was still in my towel, but it sounded urgent, so I dutifully obeyed. He pointed at the TV and asked, “Do you recognize this place?”

Without hesitation I said, “It’s where we got married.” I was thinking that it was pretty cool that the Nutmeg Restaurant was on TV…that is until I realized that it was being featured on an A&E show called Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal. Then I started thinking Okay, that’s kind of freaky.

Check out this video to see the episode of Psychic Kids (you might notice the above chandelier in it). The restaurant doesn’t come in until the 9:28 mark, and the 11:22 mark is when things really start to get scary. The “loft” is where the girl says she feels a ghostly presence and that was where my bridesmaids and I got dressed before the wedding.

When I thought about it, I remembered we did have a bit of a ghostly experience in the loft. We tried to open the window and all of a sudden it fell out of the track. By all laws of physics, the window should’ve gone crashing to the ground, but it didn’t. Something caught it and it teetered there, jutting out a weird angle. Here’s one of the guys from the restaurant trying to put the window back in place.

Come to think of it, my whole wedding seemed kind of cursed. We had originally booked a boat on the Connecticut River, but six months before the date, I got a piece of certified mail with the deposit check (at least I got my money back) and note that said the docking site had been bought out and we’d have to find a new place to have our wedding. That was no easy task, considering we had already booked the D.J. and photographer and couldn’t really change the date. (In wedding time, six months is like two days!)

Luckily the Nutmeg Restaurant was available, so we booked it right up. Then a few days before the date we found out the wedding planner there was “let go.” That meant the main person we had been working with to plan our entire wedding was not going to be working there on the wedding day. It also poured for 13 (gotta love lucky 13) straight days leading up to the wedding. It poured so hard that the hotel we stayed at the night before had massive leaking. And that was just the big things, never mind the million little snafus that happened.

Oh, and I just remembered that my sister accidentally left her dress in the loft after the wedding. The hubby and I went back the next day to try and find dress and to pick up a few other things that had been forgotten. The dress was no where to be seen! (There was a wedding after ours, and it’s possible someone from that wedding took it, but now that I know about the ghost, I’m blaming it on him.)

Turns out the actual wedding was awesome. The ceremony was personal (and brief), the food was delicious, and the dance floor was packed most of the day. The sun even came out in the afternoon. I guess it wasn’t so bad having a haunted wedding site.

Magnetic Poetry: Poink

January 6, 2010 / Katie L. Carroll

Girls’ Christmas (my “sisters” and I get together every year for a girls-and-kids-only Christmas party) was relocated to my house at the last minute, so I requested that my guests create a sentence with the magnetic poetry kit on my refrigerator. Here’s what we came up with (as usual, I put a space in between each magnet to show the creative combinations):

love people like they a r e obedient prostitute s (I would think any obedient prostitute is easy to love, so this could be a new logo for world peace or something!)
experience perfect pleasure through bald chicken rhythm dance ing (I’d like to see bald chicken rhythm dancing…or on second thought, maybe I wouldn’t.)
spark random inspiration speak every thought investigate precious emotion (lather, rinse, repeat)
electric transgress ion s will burn holy fire (That’s what she said!)
the devil s skeleton is suck ing seed y sweet & sour soup (Nice alliteration…who knew the devil’s skeleton liked Chinese food?)

In other word news, my sister, niece, and nephews are trying to get the word “poink” into mainstream vocabulary. This started when my three-year-0ld nephew told my sister he didn’t want to sit in one of the dining-room chairs because it had a “pionk.” My sister asked, “What’s a poink?” So he showed her a broken chair rung that was sticking into his back. They now use the word regularly.

Poink has actually turned out to be very versatile. It can be a noun, as in the original sense: That needle has a sharp poink. It can be a verb, literally: Ouch! That needle just poinked me. It can be a verb, figuratively: Oh, you just got poinked. It can be an adjective: That needle is very poinky.

I checked out the urban dictionary and found some interesting definitions for poink and poinky. I recommend everyone tries to use poink in a sentence today.

(Not) Making New Year’s Resolutions

December 28, 2009 / Katie L. Carroll

I haven’t made a New Year’s resolution in quite a few years. I find them somewhat arbitrary and limiting. Just because it’s January 1st, doesn’t mean that it’s the right time for me to set a certain goal. Maybe I just like to buck tradition, but I kind of enjoy the freedom of not having a resolution. And let’s be honest, most people who make resolutions fail (according to Wikipedia…which is, of course, always right…only 12% succeed).

Many resolutions are fitness and/or diet related. Seeing as I prefer to exercise outside and I live in New England, creating an exercise goal in the middle of winter doesn’t seem like a good idea (really, I’m just setting myself up for failure). As for diet, well I tend to try and be good all year long—admittedly with varying degrees of success—and I always try and be more careful after the usual holiday indiscretions (indigestions?).

A lot of my writing friends make writing resolutions. Right now, I’m working on revising a MG novel, I’m writing a first draft of a YA novel, and I’m considering doing another round of revisions on a YA novel that I had been sending out to editors and agents. I’m attending a writing conference in early April, so I’m planning my writing deadlines around that.

I prefer not to limit myself to one time of year for making resolutions. I see each and every day as a new opportunity to work on being a better person. That also means if a day goes by and I didn’t exactly meet my goal, there’s always tomorrow. Just in the last few weeks, I realized I haven’t been stretching myself as a human being much lately, so I came up with a kind of crazy idea (which I’ll be blogging about in the near future) to amp up my own level of introspection.

For those of you who do like to make resolutions, I’d love to hear what they are so I can help cheer you on along the way.