WIPs

Life hasn't left much room for stitching this week as we enter into the final countdown for Christmas ... cleaning and shopping have supplanted my usual leisure hour activities ... and work seems to be taking up more than its fair share of the day: a nine hour workday on Monday and an eleven hour workday on Tuesday and another eleven hour workday today ... even though today was punctuated with the mandatory Christmas parties, regional and parish, it's still work so far as I am concerned since I am hostess of the parish party with all the set-up and clean-up that entails ... and though this afternoon's event was a luncheon party, glad-handing colleagues-in-ministry, it kept me from all the things I needed to do at home and at the parish office. Call me Scrooge, but I really wish I could get off the merry-go-round of professionally mandated Christmas celebrations and just celebrate in my heart and in my home. I guess as I get older I find myself in need of more simplicity ... less stuff, less fuss, less running to and fro, and, dare I say it, fewer people. My natural inclination to be something of a hermit is intensifying at an alarming rate. But comparative solitude shall just have to wait till the retirement years and then, with all the natural contrariness of human nature, I shall probably long for company.

But I did squeeze in a bit of stitching, if only for the sake of my sanity. Here's my current progress on one of my ornaments for the Bride's Tree SAL: Workbasket's Quaker Santa.