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I have finished most of the cataloging work on the pre-school's collection. There's a set of small, pamphlet-ish books left and a couple of shelves of books on child development and parenting, and then it will truly be done. Now, I'm looking at the non-cataloging parts of things and trying to figure out how to make the collection and catalog generally accessible. LibraryThing is frustrating me because I have trouble finding things on the website and because I'm already seeing some alterations I'm going to have to make to the records to make them easily searchable. LibraryThing requires exact search strings, including all punctuation, so I think I'm going to have to go through and strip out all punctuation in the middle of titles, change all ampersands to 'and' and so on.

I'm trying to figure out a good way to get out Christmas shopping. Scott's schedule isn't looking likely to allow a family shopping trip which means that I need to (a) pack Delia up and take her shopping with me by bus, (b) find someone to babysit Delia while I shop or (c) find someone willing to drive both of us out to shop. (I'd love to find both b and c, but I'm enough of a realist to consider that unlikely.) I've asked my MIL if she can help. We'll see.

The hardest part of the shopping will be finding stocking stuffers for Scott. I need a lot of little things. I'm also going to have to trust Scott to pick up things for Delia. I don't like doing that because I'm not certain that he won't forget (last year, she ended up getting some of her presents late. She didn't notice then. This year, she will).

This weekend, I took the latches off of the drawers in Delia's dresser. We'd been meaning to do it for a while, but Scott hadn't had time to get to it, and I'd been afraid to wear myself out with it while I was home alone with Delia. I managed to get all the screws out without injuring myself and then collapsed. I really should have been smart enough to eat something before starting.

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One of our neighbors gave Delia an advent calendar. We have some in storage in the basement, and I'd been planning to pull one out for her, but I got pre-empted. The gift is one of those advent calendars with a small piece of chocolate for every day. It's a generous gift and one that I wish we hadn't gotten. Delia's going to expect that all advent calendars will have chocolate, and I have no intention of buying that sort for her in the future (especially since I'm likely to pick them up on sale after Christmas and stow them in a tote in the basement until next year).

I'm thinking more about Christmas traditions this year than I have in a long time. Delia's old enough to notice them now, so I'm trying to figure out ways to make the traditions I remember from my childhood work for us now. Some will be easier than others, I think.

We always used to decorate the tree late, not earlier than the 19th or 20th and then leave it up until the Twelfth Night. We'd have a little party for the decorating, inviting a few people over, making cookies and so on. Then we'd have a family only party for the take down (which also involved eating the edible ornaments). My mother made a rice porridge for breakfast on Christmas day. There was one almond in it, and whoever got it was supposed to have a lucky year. As I recall, my sister, brother and I all liked getting the almond better than we liked eating the porridge (not that it tasted bad. We were just apt to take larger servings than we would otherwise in hopes of getting the almond).

We had two LPs of Christmas music. One was done by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and the other was all in Swedish. (My mother had spent a year in Sweden during high school as an exchange student.) I don't remember the titles of either, but I'd like to get my hands on them.

My mother had made batik stockings for me and my sister when we were small. She had stopped doing batik by the time my brother arrived, so his stocking was different. For many years, we didn't have a fireplace, so we simply pinned our stockings to back of the couch with big safety pins (my brother had some anxiety about the stockings after my parents moved to another house without a fireplace. He didn't remember the previous arrangements because he hadn't even been a year old when we moved). Each Christmas, we'd find some sort of exotic (for the time and where we lived) fruit in the stockings (along with other stuff). I remember kiwis, pomegranates, and kumquats. I think we may have had a prickly pear once, too.