Time to Start the Christmas Season!

OK, so I am a little behind …I have been so busy de-cluttering that I almost forgot about my Christmas preparations.  Sad but true.  But I have made a lot of progress, so will be able to take out some time for wrapping present and baking cookies and stuff.

I have decided to respect other people’s space as well as my own by not giving them any Christmas presents.  Handy and cheap for me, you might think, and consider me a cheapskate and a tightwad.  Since I am the number 1 fan of Uncle Scrooge this does not faze me.  Anyway, you are quite wrong; although I shall no longer give the sort of rubbish which clutters up other people’s houses, I shall continue to give them (a) perishables, ie things to eat and drink and use up, (b) useful things, ie something they really do need, and (c) small things which take up little space yet are very beautiful, ie scarves and Christmas Tree ornaments.

(a) Shall be the subject of quite a few of my posts between now and Christmas, because I plan to give cookies and Stollen and perhaps even Dominosteine to my favourite friends.  I will make photos, too, so those among you who live to far away to receive baked goods can at least look at the finished products and imagine they are eating them.  I am very kind and generous that way.

(b) Is a minor category as far as my friends are concerned, since they are all rich and need nothing.  I have managed to find a little something for K, who is not really poor but has this habit of admiring something and then not buying it, and then regretting not buying it.  A very useful habit for me, because I quickly rushed out and bought it for her!

(c) Was much on my mind yesterday, because I haunted the website of my favourite Christmas Tree ornament manufacturer and ordered a few special items – some for myself and some for a few select friends.  These ornaments are very small and flat, so one can shove them into an envelope together with a Christmas card as a little present.  They are made of pewter, and beautifully painted, and I like to buy a few every year for my Christmas decorations trove.

So buying Christmas presents is not really necessary, except for a few little ones for myself.  Lest you think I have all of a sudden become frugal, let me assure you that I have bought all the big ones for myself a long time ago and am hoarding them in a secret location!

The most urgent thing now is to prepare the dough for Pfefferkuchen.  You may have encountered them in large cellophane bags in the cheaper shops in the pre-Christmas season, and wonder why I propose to produce such sad specimens of the cookie world.  Well, obviously mine are better!  I use an ancient tested recipe, and have been ordering ingredients from the German Bakery in London recently.  Sadly they didn’t have Butter-Lard, so I have to make it myself again.  Luckily I have an old cookbook that explains how.  If you live in a foreign country, far away from the flesh-pots of Germany, you learn to make everything yourself.  Would you believe I even made my own Quark, a sort of cottage cheese, so I could make cheesecake, when I lived in Oregon?  The list of my talents is extensive.

Anyway.  These Pfefferkuchen have two time-consuming requirements.  Firstly, the dough has to sit in a warm place for two or three weeks prior to baking.  Not an easy thing to achieve in my non-centrally heated house!  Secondly, they need at least two weeks to lose their rock-hard consistency after baking.  You do the maths!  It is high time I got going.  It’s this week or not at all!  Time's awasting!

After that the Dresdner Christstollen must be tackled.  Then Nuernberger Plaetzchen.  After that I will make Zimtsterne (except I never use the star-shaped form, way too much work), and probably Buttergebaeck.  Plus Nuernberger Lebkuchen, can’t miss them off the list.  And when all that is done I am going to try something new:  Dominosteine.  Never made them before, but I have high hopes.  They are dreadfully expensive to buy, so making my own will be a huge savings.  Except that I will eat about ten times as many and not save a penny – let’s not go there.

The other thing I am considering is making some more candied citrus fruit peel.  It is much better than the stuff one can buy ready made in shops, and doesn’t really take all that long to make.  I am almost out of the batch I made a few years ago.  Wonderful in the stollen!  The problem is, I need fruit that have not been treated with herbicides, pesticides, wax, and any of the other chemicals that poison the regular varieties.  This Saturday I am in London, perhaps I shall nip over to Harrods …

Of course there are many other things to do aside from baking.  I must dip a few bees wax candles, supplies are running low and maybe I will make a few spare ones and give them away as presents.  Things will really heat up just before the first of Advent, because ideally everything should be ready then.  But there is still plenty of time, and if one is organised one can get everything done.

So onwards and upwards, allez hop, los los zack zack mach schnell!

The pre-Christmas season is now officially open!

 

 

Shopping for Plants in Paris

Paris is great for buying potted plants.  There are any number of street markets where one can purchase plants – and especially flowers! galore, but my favourite is just down the road from Notre Dame.  It is called Allee Celestin Hennion, and consists of a number of large green houses, filled to the brim with plants in pots.  There are also  plant shops on the other side of the Seine, and indeed pet shops as well, but although they sport alluring items like ten foot long artificial alligators, I prefer the ones at Celestin Hennion.  Photos are better than words to describe their manifold attractions, so here they are!

It rained and drizzled and dripped throughout my stay, but I dare say the plants loved it.  I was OK with it, too, since I was in excellent company and had some severely entertaining chats, and good food and drink, too.  The only fly in my ointment was that I did not find any new Oncle Picsou magazines.  Oh well, better luck in November!

The Great Post-La Bourboulian De-clutter Craze

It’s been a while since I last posted.  Partly this is because I have been frightfully busy at work, but mainly because I have been frightfully busy at home.

Whenever I return from La Bourboule I embark on a massive de-cluttering orgy.  One year it was the attic, then the cupboards, after that the kitchen.  When I am in La Bourboule I have a large spacious practically empty apartment.  There is practically no clutter.  Just a bed, a table, a few chairs, a cupboard for dishes, a wardrobe for clothes – and that’s it.  No books, no knickknacks, no pictures, no carpets – no dusting!  It is so restful for the mind, and so calming to the nerves.  And so great not to have to dust!  I am at heart a minimalist.  Unfortunately I am also at heart a Victorian pack rat.  An uneasy combination!  Anyway, whenever I return from La Bourboule the minimalist is in the ascendancy, and my mind craves simplicity.  So I de-clutter with a vengeance until the feeling wears off.  But this year I took things much further – my health was at stake!

For a year or two I had noticed an occasional tendency for the inside of my nose to swell, with the result that breathing through it was difficult, especially at night when I was in a horizontal position.  This was not an asthma issue – breathing through the mouth was fine.  OK, so I have a narrow nose, but this was a new problem for me.  I bought a little anti-snoring device that kept my nostrils open at night which I used when necessary and thought no more about it.  But within 24 hours of arriving in La Bourboule the problem disappeared.  And within 24 hours of leaving La Bourboule it re-appeared.

Putting on my detective hat I analysed the situation.  Why did I not have this problem in the past?  What had changed?  And why was this not an issue in La Bourboule?  We had just had two very cold winters.  I had secondary double-glazed all the windows.  I.e. I had not been keeping the windows open a lot these last two winters.  Which reduced ventilation.  Which lead to a build-up of indoor pollution, dust particles, etc.  Which resulted in some sort of allergic reaction in my nose.  That was my theory.

Extensive googling confirmed my hypothesis that asthma and allergies increased in houses with double glazing and insulation.  Doggone it, I had been so proud of my insulated house, and now I have to face the fact that I had basically sealed myself into an allergy producing chemical dustbowl cum hellhole!  Dash dash dash!!!!

What’s a woman to do?  The obvious thing would be to sell up and move to La Bourboule, but the market for university fundraisers is decidedly limited there, so I would be very poor, if disgustingly healthy.  Alternatively I could try and clean up the house.  That’s what I have been doing ever since I came back from La Bourboule.

Firstly, I surveyed my possessions.  They were manifold and gathered dust easily.  To clean the house was very laborious, partly because of my dust-catching possessions, partly because I have so much stuff that vacuuming requires an awful lot of moving of furniture.  As a result I dusted & hovered less often than was desirable (from an allergy point of view).  Therefore I decided to first thin out my possessions.

I donated 36 large shopping bags full of books to the Oxfam bookshop; I even filled out a gift aid declaration, I expect they will make a small fortune.  Then I summoned my trusted antiques dealer and sold him the following:  four bookcases, two large arm chairs, two tables, a mirror, a stepladder, a magazine rack, a laundry rack, and a few other bits and pieces.  This required quite a lot of work – going through one’s books and deciding which ones to throw out requires both time and moral fibre, as does finding places for all the knickknacks that had rested on the tables and bookcases I had sold.  I got rid of most of them.

The biggest struggle was a certain armchair, which I loved fiercely despite being totally useless and consistently in the way.  In the end I bribed myself.  I am technically on a scarf-ban (I have so many that I decided to stop buying them for a while), but for this noble purpose allowed myself an exception.  So I swapped the chair for Rythmes du Monde.  Half of me feels pathetic for needing to be bribed to let go of the chair, half of me is grateful there is something I can be bribed with – without my lust for scarves I would still be stuck with that chair!  It was touch and go – five minutes before the dealer arrived I almost decided to keep it, but told myself sternly that I had bought the scarf so could not back out of the deal now.

Having de-cluttered the house of furniture, I turned my attention to the garden, and cut it back savagely, much to the disgust of the neighbourhood birds.  After a weekend of hard work I returned to the house for some more de-cluttering.  I had become a fanatic!  One morning I woke up at 5, decided to get up to make a cup of tea, and while my tea was getting cold I sorted through my CD and DVD collection and discarded half of them.

Whereas I used to spend my Saturdays haunting thrift-stores I now wandered through the Little House, casting a jaundiced eye over my possessions, thinking, do I want to dust this for another 50 years?  And I continued to fill large shopping bags with things. 

Last weekend my de-cluttering reached a major peak: first I sorted out the Mouserleum (conservatory), threw out all sorts of ‘this will come in handy some day’ bits & bobs, and made dozens of spiders homeless.  Then I had a quick dinner, and decided to watch a movie.  On route to my Nostalgia Studio, where I watch movies, I passed the bedroom.

The top of the curtains were very dusty, and the bed-hangings impossible to vacuum properly.  Moths had been having orgies in them for years.  I hated to look under the bed, because although I did not store anything there, reaching the dust in its outer reaches was tricky.  Something had to be done.  It was 20:30 hours Saturday night.  I decided to move all the furniture around, the four poster bed, the six foot long wardrobe, the tall linen cupboard.  God gave me strength.  I finished at 23:25 hours, and sank into my bed utterly exhausted.  But the job was done.

Did I mention that my vacuum cleaner is crap?  There are few things as soul destroying as spending two hours hoovering the house, putting the hoover away again, and discovering that the carpet is still covered in dust and fluff.  I had enough!  I bought a Dyson.  Even though I bought a reconditioned one, one third off regular price, it was still expensive.  But I did not care.  I decided to pay for it out of my scarf budget.  I had turned from being a scarf addict to being a Putzteufel (cleaning fiend).

I had recently acquired some humidity meters, and discovered that the humidity in the Little House was unhealthily high, so I bought a dehumidifier.  Every 12 hours I collected 2 litres of water.  This went on for weeks.  Currently the collection rate has slowed to about 1 litre every 12 hours.

Sunday morning, after the Great Bedroom Shift Around, I longed for nothing but rest.  I bought two (!) croissants, the Observer, and barricaded the front door.  Peace at last!  But alas, after a mere half an hour of reading my urge to clean & de-clutter arose again.  Sighing deeply I put the paper aside and set to.  I dusted and vacuum cleaned for about six hours, I wiped the floors and washed the top of wardrobes, I dusted picture frames and polished the stairs.  Clearly I had gone quite mad.

Where will it all end?  Will I wake up on bare boards one day, having de-cluttered my bed?  Will I limit the number of my books to three, like Leberecht Huehnchen – one Bible, one cookbook, and Don Quijote?  My journey has only just begun.

 

 

Anyway, I hope all this frantic de-cluttering and cleaning will appease my mucus membranes!