SusieJ's Advent Calendar: December 11, 2007

The recipe: Spritz

Spritz seem to be either very easy, or very frustrating. It's one of the first cookies I bake, to get me into the swing of things. Mostly my shapes are traditional: trees (often green) with multi-colored non-pariels and a silver dragee for a star, hearts, diamonds, red and green pinwheels, and blue camels. Hey, I didn't say it was everone's tradition.

The surprise: iSkate

Normally, Flash games skate right on by my awareness. This year, I set out to find some really cute, not-too-challenging, fun, wintry games. What better than a game that combines the fun of ice skating with the danger of hot cocoa? Challenging, but you can always reward yourself with some hot cocoa.

The ornaments were hung from the Ethernet with care

I've had a Christmas tree almost every year of my life, even in my first apartments in college, the year I married nine days before Christmas, and the year the kitchen cabinets were spread throughout the first floor.

The Fall and Winter I worked outside Stuttgart, my family had a tree, of course. It was a lovely tree — my aunt had enough ornaments for multiple trees, and would have a theme each year. In 1989, it was a red tree.

I'd stocked up on Christmas ornaments at the outdoor Weihnachtsmarkt in Stuttgart; it was a shame to keep them packed away, and they found a home hanging from an office plant (a ficus, perhaps) at IBM Möhringen. My colleagues shrugged it off an another crazy Americanism.

The first two of our three Christmases downtown, my husband and I were convinced we didn't have enough room in a two-room apartment for a tree (I rebelled the third year and bought a three-foot artificial tree). People still gave us Christmas ornaments, and I still wanted to display the ornaments from my Christmas in Germany.

But where to hang them? We didn't have curtain rods, or a chandelier. We did have an Ethernet cable running from the modem, along the floor, up and around a doorway, and to a hub. That cable was a fine place to hang a few ornaments for those years.