Christmas is almost here and I'm ready (almost)!

So, I'm finally getting a chance to post.  The presents are wrapped, packages are sent, cookies are baked, and the Christmas cards and letters went out yesterday.  Whew!  I'm a little behind with the Christmas cards I know, but I needed to wait until I could get Middle Child a haircut.  For some reason he didn't want me to cut it.  Silly boy!

Our Christmas letter was a quiz again, but this year's quiz was 3 truths and a lie.  Each question was comprised of 4 statements, 3 which were true and one was a lie.  The goal was to pick out the lie in each set of statements. I don't think anyone is going to get a perfect score, because Dear Husband and the kids took the quiz yesterday and nobody got them all correct!  These are truths and lies about our own family!  Okay, I admit there are some  tricky questions in there. Good thing I'm not a teacher - the students would all be crying and I'd be getting barraged with nasty emails from the parents. Better to work alone, I think...

I've always enjoyed arts and crafts, but didn't begin oil painting until after James was born. I went through a period in the late 90's and just into the 2000's when I got in to painting ceramic Santas. Most of them have since chipped and broken in our many moves since then, but I found a few that were still intact when decorating for Christmas.  Aren't they cute!  I loved adding all the little details. Usually, my Santa was a bit more flashy that just a red suit with white trim...  he wore stripes, plaid, and other patterns and drove a sleigh with leopard print seat.  All but the first few have my "trademark" - a patch sewn on by Mrs. Claus with her lip print.  Even his fab clothes needed patching once in awhile and, let's face it, Mrs. Claus doesn't have much to do in the North Pole.  You can see this the best in the bottom right corner on the knee of the tall Santa and the hood of the round one.

Never fear, I'm still working on my 50 by 50 goal.  Recently I've started a painting of one of my favorite holiday ornaments.  Which I'm hoping to have done by Christmas.  Here is the step-by-step progress of laying in the background.  In the photo in the top center, I've put in the dark areas, but haven't started the background.  I first added the darkest areas and marked where the tree lights would be.  Little by little, I worked from dark to light and from background to foreground.  The background still needs some details, but I need to work on the ornaments first. Once they're finished, I'll return to the background and add just as many details as needed, so that the focus can be on the ornaments, not the background.  It doesn't look like much now, but it's going to be beautiful once those ornaments are in!