I don't think it's any surprise to you that I prefer home-made Christmas gifts. Last year I knitted 50 pairs of 1-inch long mittens to attach to Christmas cards. Still looking for yours? Huh. Don't know what to tell you. Call your post office.

The next logical step would have been to make 50 little matching hats and attach them to cards to send out to last year's recipients so they would have a matching set. Or maybe little scarves. Or perhaps both hats and scarves. No, don't go look in your mail box. I didn't do it. Maybe next year.

Besides that, I should be cranking out some kind of gifts for the few people on my list. But I'm not in the mood. Pot holders? Embroidered tea towels? Knitted dish cloths? It's one of those deals where I'll wake up one morning with only a couple of days to get a bunch of sewing done.

Part of the problem is that I don't know what I want to make. It would have been a good year to do something completely different, something involving gold spray paint and perhaps some glitter. Pine cones would have been a nice thing to torture in this manner. Too bad I don't have any pine cones. No. I'm not going to go buy some now.

Cookies or little nut breads or fruit cakes you say? Someone in Colorado sends me a tin of cookies every year. News flash: you can pack a bunch of something in a tin can, seal it shut with wide tape, slap a mailing label on it, and the post office will deliver it with the proper postage. These cookies arrive looking like drunk crazy people baked and decorated them. Mostly because that's who baked and decorated them. More important, they've crumbled and picked up the flavors from the surrounding cookies, so not very good. But I always let on that I'm delighted because I figure the whole project is some kind of therapy for somebody.

I'll come up with something. Not today. Maybe tomorrow.