1998 december 10

i'm gonna perk you up

okay, okay, i'm going to write more about christmas. 'tis the season and all that.

i made the mistake of grabbing the remote after dinner. i idly surfed up and down the cable, looking for anything to entertain me and not expecting to find anything when lo and behold, what to my wandering eye should appear but katie brown.

i'm gonna share a real brown family secret with you!

this woman has enough body language for several small third world countries. she weaves and bobs and rocks. her hands flail about wildly, twisting and turning in the air before they finally clutch together in a heartfelt clasp above her heart. her eyebrows dance up and down, her eyes get all squinty and then fly wide open.

whaddya say we go wild with the table settings?!?

i am feeling woefully inadequate. martha stewart tends to inspire me, but if i can't live up to her high standards of christmasdom, i can always fall behind the excuse of being rather a bit poorer than she, and also having much less free time. ms katie brown offers me no such out; everything she made was immenently affordable and took less than ten minutes to complete. of course, quite a bit of it was brilliantly ugly but that seemed to be beside the point.

whaddya say we put this whole giant christmas extravaganza together?!?!

did you notice she uses whaddya say a lot? martha would never say that. neither would i. in fact i decided that i would skip putting feather boas around the edges of stockings, would skip scrunching up bits of wire mesh into interesting christmas ornaments, would skip making a mashed potato/sausage/mushroom stuffing for my turkey. i think i may well skip the katie brown experience all together, although i am fascinated by her multitude of uses for armature wire. i must get some and see what i can do with it.

i did decide, however, that i would make my very own dessert tonight. i put a handful of little peppermint candies into a ziplock bag, beat them into submission with a rolling pin and then stirred them into softened vanilla ice cream. absolutely divine. both martha and katie would be proud of me.

off to make a really darling ornament, claire