Day 1 in New Zealand: Jet Lagged in Auckland

I don't know if it was the anxiety-ridden mess that I am or the Girl Scout that I also am, but I felt like this vacation required an "In Case We All Die" set of instructions for my younger kid.

And what WAS my younger kid supposed to do if we all died?

Call my calmest mom friend, of course! 

Stay in college, no matter what.

Keep our family home so she has a home base that isn't a relative's or friend's house.

Ask one of my other mom friends, or one of my other other mom friends, to adopt Luna.

Ask her best friend who loves cats as much as she does to foster Jones and Spots while she's at school, and then she can get them back on holidays.

It occurs to me only now that we're back home that what I probably should have actually been telling her is how to get into the bank accounts and where to find all our important documents, but let's be honest--I barely know all that info, myself. It takes all the combined mental powers of both my partner and I to remember every semester how to get into the kids' 529 accounts to pay their tuition, much less how to log into our insurance stuff. 

Actually, do I even have life insurance? I'm pretty sure I don't. Bury me as cheaply as possible, Kids!

Mental note that organizing our finances into something reasonably discernible should probably be one of my spring projects...

Second mental note that I still need to pay the older kid's spring tuition!

ANYWAY, with all the important "in case of death" decisions made, my nook loaded with books, and my phone loaded with music and podcasts, my partner and I stepped onto the big plane in Houston--

--and then he immediately fell sound asleep and left me to my own bored devices for the next 14 hours. Here's a selfie that I accidentally took about 6 hours in while I was trying to plug in my earbuds:

And here's evidence that it's actually kind of boring outside when you're smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, although I don't know what else I expected it to look like:

I got a LOT of TV watching done, which is pretty great. I watched Our Flag Means Death, which I've been VERY excited to see since it was TikTok famous back in the day--well, shit, Amazon says that there are two seasons, so I guess what I mean is I watched the FIRST season of Our Flag Means Death and I'm still looking for the second season, sigh. And Quiet on Set, whose claim to fame is that my partner woke up, looked over, saw me watching a scene of a kind of graphic retelling of a child assault, was all, "WHAT are you watching?!?", and then fell back asleep as peacefully as a lamb. And then I was stoked to see that they had the new Walking Dead spinoff, but it turned out to basically be a copy of The Last of Us, so I wasn't sad when we landed and I had to abandon it.

I LOVE airplane TV!

I don't travel internationally very often, but Customs in Greece was really nice that time I was there, Customs in England was really nice that time I was there, and Customs in New Zealand was really nice, too! Mind you, they did have a ton of signage about how they were going to charge you 400 bucks if you accidentally brought fruit or honey or dirty hiking boots into the country and it made me really paranoid that what if I HAD actually put a honey bear and a Granny Smith into my backpack and then forgot I had, but I hadn't, and everyone was pleasant.

It makes me think that maybe USA Customs and TSA are so mean all the time because it's part of the ambience? Like, you know how there are those novelty restaurants where the gimmick is that the waitstaff is super mean to you and that's part of the fun? Is that part of the fun of visiting America, knowing that the Customs person is going to act like you're trafficking antiquities and the TSA person is going to scream at you for having/not having your bag of liquids outside your carry-on?

Whatever. Time to pick up the rental car and hit up my all-time favorite tourist destination: the local grocery store!

Check. Out. This VEGEMITE DISPLAY!!!

I'm probably constantly starved for B vitamins or something, because I LOVE Vegemite. My favorite breakfast is a piece of toast spread with a thin layer of Vegemite, with half an avocado squashed on top, and a liberal shake of Everything but the Bagel seasoning covering it. It is SO good.

My partner was not impressed that I insisted on buying the giant jar of Vegemite as a souvenir, but dude. They do NOT sell GIANT JARS OF VEGEMITE in the States!

You know what's even better than a wall of Vegemite, though?!?

Duuuuuuude.

Specifically this:

DUUUUUUUDE!!!!!!!

Do you remember last year's Great British Love Affair with Cadbury with Popping Jellies!?!? I honestly never thought I'd see it again! I thought it was a limited edition! 

The fried chicken chips were disappointing--

--but the Whittaker's chocolate was fucking AMAZING. Probably better than Cadbury, if we're being honest, but if we're being really honest, I pretty much spent my time in New Zealand with a Whittaker's Hokey Pokey in one hand and a Cadbury with Popping Jellies in the other.

It was still pretty early in the morning by the time we finished our grocery run, so we took our breakfast with us on the 45-minute drive west of Auckland to Piha Beach:

And we ate in the comfy car while it finished sleeting outside!

After that, though, it was actually pretty decent--not actively spitting down freezing rain, but just windy and dramatically cloudy--so we happily spent the morning stretching our legs in the fresh air:

We didn't see any penguins... but we did see several dogs:

It's not a national park, so thus marks the beginning of the rock collection that will disconcert this year's TSA!

The day brightened up considerably on our drive back into Auckland, so much so that we had actual blue skies at the waterfront:

And since by then I'd been in the country a whole seven hours without stepping foot in a single museum, you know I was starting to sweat! Better get into the New Zealand Maritime Museum before my brain starts rejecting itself!

If you don't have a favorite type of map, you should think hard about that topic until you DO have a favorite type of map. As I've often monologued, my personal favorite type of map is the Marshall Islands stick chart:

I thought this shark fishing rattle was pretty cool:

You'll be as disappointed as I was to learn, however, that New Zealand STILL fishes shark, and in fact it's often the fish in their fish and chips. Combine that with the fact that cattle are ruining the local watersheds, and that I don't love lamb, and I pretty much lived on eggs, flat whites, and chocolate.

This was new information, and very interesting!

It's the last habitable place to be settled by humans, and yet it's not as out of the way, I wouldn't think, as someplace like Hawaii is. And there are so many islands there in the South Pacific--my kid sailed to Vanuatu, Fiji, and Tuvalu before she sailed to New Zealand, and it just blows my mind to think how tiny they are in comparison and yet they were settled first. 

Reddit has some more context, but I don't think anyone has a definitive explanation.

The museum also had some interesting artifacts about European immigration to New Zealand. In particular, check out my other old friend, the clay pipes!!! Last year on the Thames, I mudlarked some bits and pieces very similar to these beauties:

Books are also my friends:

This was pretty cool--that little whaleboat was built in New Bedford. I was just IN New Bedford!

I found one of these knot-tying displays in every museum I could muscle myself into in New Zealand, and I am OBSESSED with them. I want to learn ALL the knots now!

The monkey's fist is thus far my favorite knot:

This exhibit on Customs in New Zealand cracked us up, although in retrospect we might have just been hysterical from the long travel, because it's not *that* funny to find an exhibit on Customs 10 hours after going through Customs, ahem...

Anyway, look! It's bootleg DVDs that got seized by Customs!

I guess you're also not allowed to import your own pre-built genuine Scottish whiskey distillery? Looking at it was like being back halfway across the world, going on a distillery tour in Kentucky and learning about the owner's ancestor's once-booming Prohibition-era moonshine business.

Not shown is the New Zealand Emirates Team America's Cup yacht because it was just too stinking big, but now I know a weird amount about yachting and I feel a shocking amount of mom guilt that I did not put my children through an organized progression of children's yachting classes, including letting them compete in P-class yacht races. 

Just... it's a whole life of yachting opportunities, just gone. Even if the kids started now, they'd never be able to truly compete with people who'd been yachting since they were children. So weird and fascinating how geography guides one's life in all these ways you'd never even think about.

After absorbing SO much maritime information, I ate the first of MANY meals of eggs--

--we wandered the oceanfront, trying to guess where the kid's ship would be docked in just a couple of days and enjoying the ambiance--

--and then put ourselves through the living hell of driving through Newmarket to get to our hotel with the narrowest parking lot with no visibility down a one-way street so if you chickened out of making the turn since you couldn't see what might be coming at you, you were punished by then having to make a 20-minute series of right turns taking you THROUGH FUCKING NEWMARKET AGAIN and I swear to god the next time we did not even care what might be coming at us, we were NOT doing that again.

On to a hot shower, a grocery store within walking distance, and a 7pm bedtime!

Tomorrow, we go see Bilbo!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

Day 7: Wellington to Pancake Rocks

Day 8: Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers

Day 9: TranzAlpine Train Across the Southern Alps

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I Sewed a Christmas Tree Skirt, as Requested

How did we ever get by without a Christmas tree skirt?!?

It looks so pretty, and now I think the tree would look naked without it, but until my older kid suggested one last year, it had never occurred to me.

Although my kid has a sort of contentious relationship with her memory, so by "suggested," what I actually mean is that when we were decorating the tree, she dug through a couple of bins and then said, "Where's the tree skirt?"

I said, "We don't have a tree skirt."

She said, "What about the tree skirt we used last year?"

I said, "We didn't have a tree skirt last year."

She said, "Yes, we did."

I said, "No, we didn't."

She said, "Yes, we did."

No, we didn't:

Merry Christmas 2023 from Spots and Jones!

Nor did we in 2022:

How about way back in 2016, maybe?

Merry Christmas 2016 from Gracie, the best of cats

Nope! Although that was the year that I ran Pappa's train around the tree and it was ADORABLE.

Just between us, I think she's misremembering the red and white quilt I have on my bed, since I generally just pull it out as an extra warm layer in the winter. 

Anyway, to mollify her I told her that a tree skirt was a wonderful idea, even though I secretly didn't think so, and that I'd definitely make one for the tree this year, even though I secretly didn't want to.

My kids are right and I am wrong so often that it's kind of starting to get on my nerves...

I did dutifully spend most of the year low-key checking out tree skirt ideas. This one from Gathered is really pretty--

Christmas tree skirt image via Gathered

So is this one from Sewing with Scraps:

Starburst tree skirt image via Sewing with Scraps

I also really like this Dresden skirt pattern from Carrieactually on etsy:

Dresden tree skirt image via Carrieactually

At the very last minute, I happened upon this Nutcracker tree skirt pattern from The Weekend Quilter--

Nutcracker tree skirt image via The Weekend Quilter

--and I almost went for that one because you KNOW how we feel about The Nutcracker over here, but I still haven't taught myself FPP, shame on me. I've looked at a lot of YouTube tutorials, but honestly I think I may need to just get a book on how to do it.

But then in one of my quilting Facebook groups, a group member posted a photo of the tree skirt that she'd made by altering the Chroma Quilt pattern from Taralee Quiltery, and I was sold.

To alter the pattern from a traditional quilt to a tree skirt, you pretty much just have to omit the center octagon from the pattern and then cut through one side of the finished quilt. Sewing the first set of triangles is a little fiddly without that octagon to anchor them--

--but after that you can continue the piecing exactly as the pattern indicates:

I did not do my neatest job on the piecing--tbh, I was basically just throwing this quilt together since I'd promised I'd make it AND I had to get it finished before I could start putting presents under the tree--and to me, the misaligned points and general messiness are very evident, ahem. But everyone else swears that they cannot see a thing wrong, even when I make them look at the very worst bits, so although I may not have perfect quilting as my legacy, I do have a perfect family.

The quilt is entirely sewn from stash, although that's a bit of a cheat because I generally always buy 100% cotton solids and abstract prints when I see them in the remnant bins at Joann, so a lot of the fabric comes from that--I dithered about buying those three different shades of green when I found them in the same remnants bin, but I don't regret it now!

The holly fabric is a true scrap, though, as I have NO idea where it came from, and the quilt back is a white sheet that somebody gave me at some point and has been just kicking around my fabric bin for years:

Pause for a festive shot of the Christmas tree in the background!

That giant back deck grill eyesore was my Christmas present to Matt in... 2020, maybe? So it's thematically relevant!

I pieced together a couple of cuts of batting to get the correct dimensions. The next time I make a quilt, I'm going to have to splurge on new batting, grr!

So festive! Especially because in this shot you can barely see the giant back deck barbecue grill! My favorite part of our Christmas tree is that a good 98% of the ornaments are handmade, and another 1.5% are vintage ornaments from childhood family trees:

After that, all I had to do was bravely cut straight through the quilt I had just painstakingly pieced and sewn and backed and quilted--

--and then bind it with some stash binding, sandwiching three sets of ties in between the binding and the quilt:

And here's this year's Christmas tree, exactly the way that my older kid dreamed it should be:

It's kind of a nightmare with the robot vacuum, but it looks so pretty with the presents.

Now I want to make a proper Chroma quilt, lining up all my points and everything!

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The Entire Fairy Smut Book Club Just Finished A Court of Wings and Ruin, and Part of It Was Actually Really Good! Most of It Was Not Tho...

You guys. Do you remember that my first introduction to fairy smut was back last Spring, when I was touring a college with my younger kid and saw a student-made flyer in a hallway advertising the "Fairy Smut Book Club," with a picture of the cover of A Court of Thorns and Roses on it? That's the entire reason why I got started reading this series! As the secret non-student participant and only active member of the Indiana chapter, I had to do my part!

On that topic, I have terrible news for you. My younger kid actually attends that college now, and I'm sorry to tell you that she reports that currently, there IS no longer a Fairy Smut Book Club. They weren't at the Activities Fair, they never post any meetings or activities on Bionic, and no more flyers have ever appeared in the hallways of the Old Library. 

Friends, I appear to be the last remaining member of the Fairy Smut Book Club. 

I promise to make them proud.

SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER

In all serious, DO NOT READ THIS if you ever want to read any of these books for yourself, because I want to properly write about them here, not play coy with the plot details.

If you've read them, though, here's my review of ACOTAR and here's my review of ACOMAF.

And here's a TikTok about what it's like to be me just to take up some more room on the screen in case you're still deciding...

Okay, if you're in, you're in. Here's my review of ACOWAR!

A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This has been eating at me for three books now, and so I’m just going to come out and say it:

Y’all, I don’t think that Feyre and Rhys and their good-guy gang are very smart.

I’m not going to go so far as to say that EVERY decision they make, individually or collectively, is flat-out wrong, but I’m definitely willing to say that most of their decisions are in the neighborhood of wrong-ish.

Except for when Feyre single handedly takes down the entirety of Tamlin’s Spring Court solely out of spite--that shit is HILARIOUS and is my favorite part of this entire series. It turns out that Feyre only becomes her truest self when she is being a petty little bitch, and I loved it. When they go low, you go lower, Feyre, darling! I literally cackled when she went so far as to get up in the middle of the night and go move around a bunch of rocks just so that during their fairy ceremony the next morning the first magical sunbeam would just happen to strike her and not Ianthe. Lol! Oh, and when she did a bunch of machinations to make Tamlin think that she and Lucien were having an affair, for no other reason than to piss him off! I want THAT Feyre to be my best friend and come with me to every social occasion!

Sooo…. that was the 20% of *this* book that I liked! See also: Under the Mountain in ACOTAR. If we’d stopped at Feyre’s reunion with the Night Court--I’d even have allowed that gross sex scene at the end, just because I’d been spared smut up to then--I’d have given this book 5 stars. Feyre as High Lady of Chaos and then on a buddy adventure with Lucien is just that good.

But then Maas has to go and spoil it all with another billion pages of bad decisions by people I think we’re supposed to see as smart?

BUT THEY ARE ALL SO STUPID! Which is understandable, I guess, as none of them are scholars or appear to have been academically trained in administration, politics, or bureaucracy. All their history seems to be oral, told in folk tale format? There’s also not a lot of logic, or even common sense, on display. When two more of the bloated cast of characters, Miryam and Drakon, make their miraculous appearance at the end of the book, it turns out that they hadn’t actually mysteriously disappeared at all? They’d just put a glamour over the island they’d been living on, so when fairies flew over it the island would look empty? And so everyone thought it was empty and they’d disappeared? But they hadn’t? It was just that nobody had ever thought to, I don’t know, LAND on the island and look for clues? Perhaps even look to see if they’d left a note saying where they’d gone? They were just all, wow, that island looks empty from the air, guess Miryam and Drakon disappeared what a mystery!!!

And part of their trouble is that none of the other courts trust them because Rhys spent the past several hundred years acting like a sociopath to protect his one special city. So maybe he should stop acting like a sociopath! Like, YEAH Tarquin hates you and doesn’t trust you and is unwilling to cooperate fully at first, thereby hindering your ability to defeat Hybern--you all acted like ABSOLUTE SOCIOPATHS to steal his artifact, and then you let that artifact fall into the enemy’s hands and now it’s going to kill everyone. MAYBE THAT’S WHY TARQUIN HID IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Oh, that reminds me! It’s actually 25% of the book that I liked, because my other favorite thing is how they all try to have a meeting of the “high lords” (vomit) and when Tamlin shows up, he is such a petty little douchebag and I loved it. He is my college boyfriend who, when I told him that I was breaking up with him, immediately became incensed and started screaming, “NO, I’m breaking up with YOU!!!”, and then my Uncle Sherman, who was sleeping on the couch in the den and woke up to the sound of this random-ass guy screaming at his niece out on the carport, had to come outside and be all “Young man, it’s time to go home.” Thank you, Uncle Sherman!

In all fairness, the 25% that I liked should have been more like 60%--it only wasn’t because this book is sooooo loooooong! At one point I lost serious momentum with it when hoopla auto-returned it and then when I went to check it out again for some reason like 12 people were randomly in line ahead of me and I couldn’t get it again for months, but even when I got it back the last four hours were, like… oh, right, we’re still at war and we’re FINALLY having a battle now! I keep forgetting because we keep going on side-quests to ally with people and save random magical creatures and visit other random magical creatures and make deals with magical creatures and come back to visit them again to for more wheeling and dealing or whatever and fight somebody else and have a chat with our allies and go visit the mortal world for a minute. Like, can we not do a little more of that off-screen? Or just… not?

And THEN I lost the book again for a few weeks when I had only 45 minutes left, and when I finally got it back I listened to those last 45 minutes while riding the TranzAlpine over the Southern Alps from Greymouth to Christchurch, and absolutely nothing happened in that time. Feyre talked with the legendary fairy people who’d been lost. She had a funeral for her father. Amren doesn’t drink blood anymore (and that whole side-plot to get her god powers unveiled was also stupid). For FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. UGH!

Arthur’s Pass is sooooo pretty, though!

I’m sorry to report that my second-book prediction was correct and Nesta and Elain ARE part of the ensemble cast now, and I still hate them. I’m especially pissed that Elain is mated or soulbonded or whatever to Lucien, because Lucien is clearly the hottest fairy and he does not deserve that. The second-hottest fairy is Cassian, though, so FUCKING SIGH. I think we’re supposed to see Nesta and Elaie as… redeemed? Sisterly? now, but they still act basically the same as those basic bitches who wouldn’t even help Feyre chop wood or skin rabbits in the first book, and I don’t care what kind of powers and shit they have now--they’re still not very helpful! But the wooooorst redemption is their father! I mean, come ON! We’re supposed to believe that the bastard who ALSO wouldn’t get off his ass to keep his family from starving, or at least give his youngest daughter a little bit of help every now and then while she singlehandedly kept their family alive, had an off-screen redemption and is now a knight in shining armor? Ugh, whatever. Whereas Tamlin’s complete personality change is totally believable because even in the first book I thought he was high-key gross, this complete overhaul of Feyre’s awful family does. Not. Work. I know it sucks that Maas wanted to do something different with them after she’d written them into a corner, but sorry, that’s just what happens when you write people into a corner. Pick a different plot that works with what you’ve already done! And honestly, it would have made Feyre a much more interesting character if she chose to fight so hard to protect the mortal realm even though nearly everyone in the mortal realm had been worthless pieces of shit to her. She should have had more of Greyson’s characterisation, because that dude was all, “I fucking hate you but fine, I will help you, because morals.”

I’m also a little sorry to report that my second-book prediction that Feyre was going to have Rhys’ winged babies was INCORRECT, gasp! I would have bet real money on that one! I was also really hoping Rhys was going to die at the end, and he kind of did, but only for a minute, sigh. So I guess they can have some bat babies in the next book. Which, at this point I have NO idea what the next two(?) books are supposed to contain? I’d kind of thought we’d carry the war on for longer, but nope, everything is all wrapped up! So what on earth are we going to plot next?

And there was a little bit of queer representation in this book, finally, but most of it was brief and uninteresting enough that you’d miss it if you happened to instead notice a deer next to your walking trail, or a squirrel ran out in front of you (I eventually took to listening to this book almost entirely on walks, where I couldn’t get away to do something, anything more interesting). The only “significant” inclusion was solely to give me an extremely disappointing #bisexualrolemodel, sigh. Or, rather, what Morrigan describes is actually being a closeted lesbian with some really terrible self-hating masking techniques, right? That was… genuinely upsetting to read, tbh. The fairy realm really needs more qualified therapists.

Oh, but the good news--for a fairy smut book, it wasn’t super smutty! Or at least… I don’t think? Just between us, the sex scenes are sooo cringy that I do the 15-second skip forward every time one starts, then repeat until it’s over, and the little snippets are still veeeeery cringey, but I don’t think I had to do that too many times, so yay! The psychic snapchatting between Feyre and Rhys is something I’m super embarrassed for them about, but hey--what mutually consenting couples do together is their own business. They don’t know we’re invading their privacy, so we need to give them some grace.

So, predictions for the next two(?) books:

Feyre and Rhys will have a baby, maybe even twins so they can have a girl and a boy barf. Maybe there will be a kidnapping plot or something?

The only possible overarching plot I can think of is something with those cross-universe old gods, just because they got brought up a lot in this book for not really any good reasons.

PLEASE do not let the POV shift from Feyre to Elain or, god forbid, fucking Nesta! Feyre already gets on my very last nerve but I will flat-out stop reading this series if I have to continue through the eyes of either of those worthless pieces of shit.

It won’t happen, but it would be HILARIOUS if we had another complete turn-around in the next book, so that Rhys is now a total dick and we cheer as Feyre falls into the loving arms of Tarquin. I would read the snot out of that!

As for the Fairy Smut Book Club, perhaps it was just a busy semester for the members, and they'll reactivate it next semester, fingers crossed. My kid has told me flat-out, numerous times, that no, she will NOT join the book club on my behalf, but she IS a member of the school's Sherlock Holmes book club, so I guess there's that. The other day she was all, "One of the other members is really obsessed with Holmes slash Watson... you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

And that's how I may or may not have found myself sharing fanfic recs with yet another total stranger!

P.S. View all my reviews.

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Cinnamon Dough is THE Most Delightful Winter Craft!

 

If you want a winter pick-me-up (AND a way to finish up all that ground cinnamon you bought for holiday baking), you will be delighted with cinnamon dough.

Cinnamon dough smells amazing. It’s as easy to make and use as play dough. It dries to near-permanence with just a couple of hours in the oven. It’s been my favorite winter activity to do with my kids ever since they were tiny.

Here’s all you need to make your own batch of cinnamon dough:

• one cup of cinnamon. Yes, one CUP!!! This project is made for those people (*cough, cough* it me *cough*) who overbuy the giant spice container every winter out of a fear of somehow running out during holiday baking. The struggle IS real, though: one year I 100% found myself Googling “DIY powdered sugar” at 9pm on Christmas Eve, and I never want to relive that experience.
• up to 5 tsp aromatic spices. I like to put in those spices that I know I’m not going to use before they expire (I’m looking at you, Allspice! And YOU, Ground Cloves!).
• .5 to 1 cup applesauce. Choose the cheapest store-brand sugar-free applesauce for this, although I won’t judge you if you find yourself panic-emptying a couple of pouches because you simply cannot go back to the freaking grocery store one more time today. Once upon a time, I made my kids a batch of play dough using organic flour because that’s what I had on hand. It wasn’t my finest moment, but I DID get to stay in my jammy pants!
• cookie sheet.

Step 1: Mix all ingredients.

Add all the dry ingredients to a bowl, then stir to combine.

Starting with 1/2 cup applesauce, mix/knead the applesauce into the other ingredients in batches. I’ve never figured out exactly why my cinnamon dough requires a slightly different amount of applesauce every year–is it the humidity? The age/variety of spices? It’s not the applesauce itself, because I always use that exact kind in the photo–but indeed, I make this cinnamon dough every single winter, and every single winter I have to play the exact amount of applesauce by ear.

You’re looking for a consistency like any other dough in your life–not crumbly, not sticky. If you’re working with younger kids, err on the side of making the dough a little wet and sticky, because a crumbly dough that doesn’t hold together with ease is almost immediately frustrating to little kids.

And yes, I’m sorry, but you will have to get your hands into it. It’s dough! If it’s any consolation, though, cinnamon is pretty nice for your skin!

Step 2: Decorate!

You can sculpt with this cinnamon dough just like you would with any dough, but my family’s favorite way to enjoy it has always been to get out the cookie cutters and make ornaments and garlands.

To make your own cinnamon dough ornaments, roll the dough no thicker than 1/4″, then cut with cookie cutters. Make a small hole for stringing onto a garland using the tip of a chopstick, or a larger hole for attaching an ornament hanger using a straw.

If you’re making a fiddly design, you can roll the dough directly onto parchment paper, then move your design, parchment paper and all, onto the cookie sheet for baking.

Just beware of trying to work with the dough when it’s cold from the refrigerator. It’s fine to store the dough in the fridge for a couple of weeks, but it will cooperate a LOT better at room temperature.

Step 3: Bake.

While you’re working with the dough, preheat the oven to around 200 degrees (depending on my oven’s capabilities over the years, I’ve used temps anywhere between 200-250 degrees with similar results. One of these days, I’ll even get around to experimenting with my dehydrator!).

This dough won’t expand, so don’t worry about placement; just set them onto an ungreased cookie sheet and set the time for an hour.

After one hour, I like to check on my ornaments and flip them. See in the above photo how the centers of the larger ornaments that I just flipped over are darker? That’s the bottom middle that hasn’t dried yet, so flipping them over and putting them back in the oven lets them dry out evenly.

After a couple of hours, the ornaments should start to be ready, depending on how big they are. I start to check on them about every 20 minutes, removing the ones that are bone-dry whenever I check. I don’t really enjoy a lot of hands-on kitchen stuff, so I’m always VERY excited when that last ornament is dry and I can finally turn the oven off!

Step 4: Attach ornament hangers.

This year, my teenager and I combined these cinnamon dough ornaments with dried grapefruit slices to make some lovely (and lovely-smelling!) winter garlands that we hope to keep on display through February.

I tied loops of embroidery floss through the holes on the other ornaments, and we put them right onto our tree.

With careful storage, these cinnamon dough ornaments should last for multiple years. A couple of years ago, after probably a decade of making them yearly and storing the survivors (it’s hard to be a Christmas tree ornament in this house!) with our other ornaments in the garage during the off-seasons, all of our cinnamon dough ornaments came out of storage a little moldy. They must have gotten damp or come into contact with something that ruined them, but it remains a mystery!

But whether you try to store them (I think I *will* try again this year!) or simply compost them in the Spring, or even just enjoy the dough as a process-oriented sensory experience and don’t keep them at all, I think this cinnamon dough will be a delightful addition to your winter craft projects!

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