Oliver insisted we have a go at making Apple strudel tonight, from my grandmother Nettie’s recipe.

Poor planning on my part meant we had to go the whole nine yards and make the dough from scratch. While we didn’t manage to get Nana-level paper-thin, we came closer than I imagined we might. In the oven now.

It’s a remarkable Christmas Eve here on the Island: warm, sunny, calm, green.

Oliver’s full-on request for help, launched in November, met with open-hearted response from those far and wide: our pantry is full, our tree is girdled with gifts, and, well, to be honest I am simply, tearfully overwhelmed with the kindness we’ve been shown.

Catherine was home from the hospital a year ago Christmas Eve; her mother had just arrived, as a surprise, from Ontario. Our house was warm and full of life. We had no idea of what harrowing events were to come: that a week later she would move to the Palliative Care Centre and, a few weeks later, that she would be dead.

There is nothing at all to recommend having your partner die: all the “this is the worst thing that can ever happen to you” reputation it has is richly deserved. And yet grief and joy can coexist, I have found. Happiness and lament, hope and dread, loneliness and warmth, pride and shame, fear and expectation. If nothing else, these 365 days have exposed me to realms of the emotional landscape I’d heretofore never glimpsed. I miss Catherine something awful; I love my son something fierce; it’s been a hard, hard year; I am excited for tomorrow. 

Merry Christmas and much love to all.

One of Catherine’s Christmas traditions I could simply never wrap my head around was setting up a model Christmas village for the holidays. It always just seemed, well, weird, with a Norman Rockwell aesthetic that I just couldn’t get behind.

But Catherine’s Christmas traditions are Oliver’s Christmas traditions, so the village rises to live another day.

On Sunday night we drove out to our friends in Belfast for a socially-distanced winter solstice campfire. It was a perfect night for it (but, of course, for it not technically being the solstice): the sky was clear, the temperature hovering around freezing. I made vegan jambalaya, they made dreamy donuts, and the fire warmed us all. Gives me hope for a season of outdoor fun.

As the video I shot of the campfire had personally-identifying audio, I swapped out the crackling for this excellent replacement. 

Nimrods’, the exuberance known for its floating pizza on the Charlottetown waterfront, has decamped for winter to the former KFC building in Stratford, upping the ante from pizza to an eclectic menu that includes everything from donuts to falafel.

To celebrate the start of the holidays, Oliver and I motored over the bridge, went through the drive-thru, ordered up a couple of salmon bagels, and came home to eat.

The bagel was fantastic, a true credit to a dish that’s hard to get right: gravlax, capers, red onion, dill cream cheese on a (very good) sesame bagel. It’s a reason to drive to Stratford.

Edward Hasbrouck’s latest post on The Amazing Race touches on love and travel:

There’s certainly an argument that if you can stay in love through a trip around the world, you can stay in love for a lifetime. It doesn’t always work out that way, though: One of my friends who met their spouse while travelling has finally concluded that it just doesn’t work when they aren’t travelling together, and is getting divorced. Travel can stress test a relationship, but many couples have discovered in recent months that “sheltering in place together” can also stress test a relationship. The takeaway, I think, is that life on the road is not the same as life “at home”, whatever that means, and neither is a good test of the other.

From the number of my friends who’ve had perfectly fine relationships that self-destructed under the pressure of travel, I can attest to this.

Nineteen years ago, at the PopTech Conference in Maine, I first learned about Canada Post’s custom postage stamp service, Picture Postage; Megatrends author John Naisbitt mentioned it in his talk.

Being a lover of postage, and of customization, you would have thought I’d have jumped at the change to craft my own stamps, but it’s taken until now for the stars to align: at the end of November I ordered a sheet of stamps using the MMXX! card I’d printed on my letterpress as the image. I’m not entirely satisfied with the result: the service imposes a design requirement to use one of its frames around your chosen image, and the only not-completely-ugly-and-intrusive option is “shadow,” but even that imposes a certain pall of ugliness on anything it wraps around.

Nonetheless: I have stamps. That I designed, typeset, printed, and photographed. That’s pretty cool.

A sheet of 50 stamps came to $80.88 with taxes and shipping included, or $1.61 for each stamp, a 75% premium over the cost of a regular 92 cent stamp. So I won’t be replacing them as my everyday postage of choice. Delivery took 17 days from my initial order.