From there to here, from here to there, Funny things are everywhere
Oops, I’m a day late. We were too busy having a low-key, wonderful family Christmas for me to be playing on the computer.
But, I hope it’s not too late to wish you and your families a wonderful Christmas season, and a new year filled with magic and joy.
Merry Christmas, with love from DaniGirl, Beloved and the boys!
Aside from the Reindeer Rant, this post from last year is probably my holiday favourite, and definitely worth sharing again!
If you’ve been around for a while, you might remember I spent some time working with the Canadian Army. When I was there, I was lucky enough to work with Captain Jennifer Stadnyk, and long after I left we stayed in touch over mutual interests in photography and social media. Capt Stadnyk has since moved from Ottawa to Colorado for what I think is an incredibly cool job – she’s the public affairs officer for the North American Aerospace Defence Command, aka NORAD. Peeps, she works with NORAD’s Santa Tracker team! How awesome is that?
I’ve blogged before about how I’ve always loved the NORAD Santa Tracker program. I remember the sense of wonder and anticipation that was torqued by watching NORAD’s Santa Tracker updates on the evening news when I was growing up in the 1970s. Now the kids and I visit the Santa Tracker website frequently on December 24 to track the Big Guy’s progress around the world.
I gotta tell you, when Capt Stadnyk was kind enough to grant me an interview, I kind of froze. Oh the pressure! What should I ask? How to strike the balance between hard-nosed journalist and fawning fangirl? In the end, her answers totally redeemed my questions – and I’ve been giggling like a schoolgirl in my excitement to share them with you.
DaniGirl: I have been watching NORAD’s Santa tracker as long as I can remember. Tell me a little bit about the program?
Capt Stadnyk: NORAD Tracks Santa traces its roots all the way back to 1955, when the local Sears-Roebuck in Colorado Springs took out an advertisement in the local newspaper inviting children to call Santa’s private line on Christmas Eve. The ad that was printed however, had a misprint and the number given was for the Continental Air Defense Command. Colonel Harry Shoup, who was on duty that night, answered the phone to a child’s voice asking if he was Santa. Once he realized what was going on, he played along, giving the child information about where Santa was and instructed his officers to do the same. Thus an annual tradition was born! NORAD continued the tradition when we replaced CONAD in 1958, and still each year, we track Santa around the globe and tell children where he is and when he’ll be at their house!
DaniGirl: You are a soldier in the Canadian Army. How did you end up at NORAD?
Capt Stadnyk: It is funny, most people think that NORAD is solely Air Force, however there are members from all elements of both the Canadian and American militaries. I definitely feel blessed to be down here and be a part of this incredible program during the holiday season!
DaniGirl: What kind of technology do you use to track Santa?
Capt Stadnyk: We are definitely well-equipped to track Santa, being the bi-national command responsible for tracking and keeping airspace over North America safe! We use the same satellites, radars and fighter jets that we use year round to track Santa. He knows we’re tracking him and often coordinates some of his plans with us! We also have “Santa Cams†strategically placed around the globe so that kids can catch a glimpse of the jolly old elf!
DaniGirl:: How many people are involved in the operation?
Capt Stadnyk: Well, along with our 55 corporate partners, we have over 1,250 volunteers (Canadian & American military, civilians, and members of the local Colorado Springs community) who donate their time on December 24th to answer calls and emails. Planning starts early in the spring of each year in order to ensure the event is a success.
DaniGirl: Have poor weather or other obstacles ever prevented Santa from getting to any locations?
Capt Stadnyk: There have been a few times over the years where Santa has had to adjust his flight path due to poor weather, but he has always been able to make it to every house! He has been flying for centuries, so little snowstorms have nothing on him!
DaniGirl: Does Santa need permission to fly over Canadian or American air space?
Capt Stadnyk: Santa travels faster than starlight, so if he wanted to, he could fly over our airspace without letting us know, but we have a close relationship with him, having worked together to keep the Christmas spirit alive all these years. He always coordinates his travels with us, although he may not tell us his exact route. Each year, Canadian fighter pilots are chosen to meet Santa as he enters North American airspace to say “Hello†and escort him across the Great White North. This year, Lieutenant-Colonel Darcy Molstad and Captain Sébastien Gorelov from 3 Wing Bagottville will meet him over Newfoundland and pass off the duties near the Ontario-Manitoba border to Captain Rich Cohen and Captain Brian Kilroy from 4 Wing Cold Lake.
DaniGirl: Now that you’re seeing it in action from the inside, what’s your favourite part of the Santa tracker program?
Capt Stadnyk: It’s incredible to see what a large operation the NORAD Tracks Santa program is. There is so much magic involved in Santa’s journey that I kind of expected tracking him would be a piece of cake. Not so much! Tracking Santa becomes our main effort around this time each year, and we all work together at NORAD to make sure we continue to share the holiday spirit with the young, and young-at-heart around the world!
Awesome, right? I KNOW! Even better than a conversation with the Universe, eh?
Want to track Santa with NORAD this Christmas Eve? He’s multimedia – check it out!
On the web: http://www.noradsanta.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/noradsanta
Twitter: @NoradSanta
Phone (starting 4 a.m. MST on Christmas Eve): 877-HI-NORAD
Email: noradtrackssanta@outlook.com
Thank you, Capt Stadnyk, for the exclusive scoop and for making me a cool mom this Christmas in the eyes of three little boys! Warm wishes and thanks to you and and everyone at NORAD for the great work you do with Santa!
When your best friend asks you to collaborate on a family portrait project to celebrate her extended, blended family, of course you say yes. And when she has an idea that is equal parts silly, fun and hilarious and perfectly exemplifies a family that prides itself on chaos, humour and love, you know you have to make it work. A little 1970s retro pop culture reference is just the icing on the cake!
And then, you have a little fun.
Pro tip: When you’ve been friends for 30+ years, you cannot make faces like this in front of a camera and not expect them to end up on the Internet.
And if your photographer friend has a truly evil streak, she’ll go one step further and turn them into one of these:
Merry Christmas to my best friends in the whole world. I love you guys and I’m always happy to be a part of your crazy. 🙂
My bloggy peeps, I have a reindeer-palooza of fun for you today! You might have read the reindeer rant a time or two (or coughninecough) before, but now we have reindeer trivia! And photoshop! And webcams! And even reindeer on a rampage! Oh my.
But first, the rant. Because especially at Christmas, traditions matter. Also? Because Donder.
“You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen;
Comet and Cupid and DONDER and Blitzen…â€
You did know that Santa’s reindeer is actually Donder and not Donner, right?
Here’s a little history lesson for you. The poem “A Visit From St Nicholasâ€, commonly known as “The Night Before Christmasâ€, was written back in 1823 and is generally attributed to American poet Clement Clarke Moore (although there have been recent arguments that the poem was in fact written by his contemporary Henry Livingston Jr.) The original poem reads, in part:
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name.
“Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on Dunder and Blixem!
As explained on the Donder Home Page (no relation):
In the original publication of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in 1823 in the Troy Sentinel, “Dunder and Blixem” are listed as the last two reindeer. These are very close to the Dutch words for thunder and lightning, “Donder and Bliksem”. Blixem is an alternative spelling for Bliksem, but Dunder is not an alternative spelling for Donder. It is likely that the word “Dunder” was a misprint. Blitzen’s true name, then, might actually have been “Bliksem”.
In 1994, the Washington Post delved into the matter by sending a reporter to the Library of Congress to reference the source material. (In past years, I’d been able to link to a Geocities site with the full text, but sadly, Geocities is no more.)
We were successful. In fact, Library of Congress reference librarian David Kresh described Donner/Donder as “a fairly open-and-shut case.” As we marshaled the evidence near Alcove 7 in the Library’s Main Reading Room a few days ago, it quickly became clear that Clement Clarke Moore, author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” wanted to call him (or her?) “Donder.” Never mind that editors didn’t always cooperate. […] Further confirmation came quickly. In “The Annotated Night Before Christmas,” which discusses the poem in an elegantly illustrated modern presentation, editor Martin Gardner notes that the “Troy Sentinel” used “Dunder”, but dismisses this as a typo. Gardner cites the 1844 spelling as definitive, but also found that Moore wrote “Donder” in a longhand rendering of the poem penned the year before he died: “That pretty well sews it up,” concluded Kresh.
So there you have it. This Christmas season, make sure you give proper credit to Santa’s seventh reindeer. On DONDER and Blitzen. It’s a matter of family pride.
(Oh yes I did take that photo with this blog post in mind. Of COURSE I did!)
And now, as promised: reindeer trivia! Courtesy of mental_floss, amaze your colleagues at the office Christmas party with these clever facts about reindeer! Did you know:
Click through to the mental_floss article for more fun reindeer facts!
But this — THIS is my favourite find of this holiday season: the ReindeerCam! I discovered this through Twitter late last week, and have been clicking through rather regularly. It’s a live feed of Santa’s reindeer-in-training enclosure at Nova Scotia’s Shubenacadie Wildlife Park (“Halfway to the North Pole”!)
I find watching the reindeer strangely compelling. Santa comes out to feed the reindeer daily through Christmas at 9 am and 3:30 pm AST (that’s 8 am and 2:30 pm EST) and waves to the camera. It’s adorable!
I noticed yesterday that Santa’s sleigh had disappeared (I’m not kidding, I’m clicking through at least a couple of times each day!) and I laughed out loud when I saw what had happened. Mad reindeer on a rampage had toppled Santa’s sleigh – and of course it was all caught on camera. Naughty Donder!!
So there you go – it’s a multimedia reindeer-palooza! But don’t forget the key message here, folks – it’s Donder, not Donner. Tell your friends!
And *this* is what makes my endless curation of family moments worth while.
Christmas 2014:
Christmas 2013:
Christmas 2012:
Christmas 2011:
Christmas 2010 (our first in Manotick and our first with a natural tree):
Christmas 2009 (in the midst of my first Project 365):
It looks like I didn’t take any photos while we decorated the tree in 2006, 2007 or 2008, but I did a genuine little “awwwwww!” of delight when I found this one hiding in the archives on Flickr.
Christmas 2005 – Tristan is three and Simon not quite two.
Oh my goodness, that seems like yesterday — and a million years ago!
Also? Apparently I love to take photos of the back of Lucas’s head!
There are a lot of needy things in my life, and I’ll be the first to admit that blog has slowly slid down the hierarchy of things that get my attention. Facebook steals all my short-form content and impulsive commentary, and while I still love to write for blog, finding the time to get all my good ideas out of my murky brain and into the computer in anything that even remotely resembles a coherent narrative is proving more and more challenging as the years go by. Poor old blog is sort of like the third child in the family these days. It’s no less loved and no less deserving of attention, but it sort of has to learn to fend for itself in the cacophony of all the other needy things making endless demands on my shrinking attention span. And, like the third child, I’m always surprised and delighted when it manages to thrive despite my best intentions stewed in a cocktail of love and benign neglect.
I saw on Twitter earlier this week that the blog had been nominated in the Best Family and Parenting Blog category of the Canadian Weblog Awards, and I was so touched. Here I feel like I’ve been dialing it in for the last little while, and (at least?) one of you still loves the blog enough to take the time to nominate it. Thank you! “They do still love me!” I thought to myself. I clicked through and took a peek to see who else had been nominated, and saw there were more than 100 other amazing blogs that had also been nominated – really a who’s who of the best of the Canadian blogosphere. I smiled and sighed and got distracted by something shiny and pretty much forgot about it.
And then Saturday morning, I was playing on Twitter and nearly fell off my chair when I saw a tweet saying the blog had been shortlisted to the group of five finalists not only in the Best Family and Parenting category but in the Life category as well. Whaaaaaat?! For reals?? I was gobsmacked, not to put too fine a point on it. Shortlisted – twice?
There were over 100 blogs nominated in each of these two categories, lists comprising many of the best blogs in Canada. I am truly and absolutely shocked to have made the top five in either, let alone both. I’ve always liked the Canadian Weblog Awards because they’re very inclusive – anyone can make a nomination – and they’re a juried competition. Real people visit each blog and make notes and give scores to create the list of top five nominees in each category, and then they do it all over again to determine the top three. I looked at all the other blogs who made the top five in each category and I gotta say, I’m genuinely honoured to have made the cut. The winners in each category will be announced December 15 after another round of juried review, but I’ve already won this one in my heart. I don’t need a first- or second- or third- place ribbon, I am truly honoured to have made it this far.
You probably know by now that your affection and interaction and adulation (too far? I always push it too far) are the fuel that runs this blog. I tried doing it for fame and for money, but in the end I can’t help coming back to doing it for love. In fact, I’ve struggled this whole post between referring to the nomination in the third person (you nominated the blog) and in the first person (you nominated me) because they are so inextricably intertwined.
I feel pangs of regret every now and then that I haven’t devoted more attention to the blog. Sometimes I feel like I’m mired back in 2007, and there are all sorts of interactive gizmos and fancy widgets I should be installing to make your experience more modern. Is it a complete anachronism to worry that the blog is getting old fashioned? Sigh. I’ll have to rely on the content and not the flashy packaging to keep you coming back!
All that to say, in a rambly way that absolutely lacks both flashy widgets and a coherent narrative: thank you. Thank you to Schmutzie for continuing to support the Canadian Weblog Awards, and thank you to the lovely peep(s) kind enough to nominate the blog, and thank you to the jurors who screened the blog through to the top five. But mostly, thanks to all of you – the new readers and the ones who have been reading and commenting and kibitzing and making this such a fun place to play for the best part of the last decade. You’ve inspired me and delighted me – and now I’ll never shut up. 🙂
Edited to add: hey, wow, lookit that! I’m number two!!
Silly old blog placed second overall in the “Life” category. Yay! This makes me very happy, and very proud. Thank you!
I don’t know what it is about the light at the Thomas Tree Farm near North Gower, but I always love the portraits I take of the boys there. I can’t believe we resisted getting a natural tree for so many years – getting the tree has turned into one of our favourite family traditions.
Winter portraits are lovely, and now that the crazy autumn season is over, I’ve got lots of free time (well, relatively speaking!) in my schedule. If you’d like to consider an outdoor winter family portrait session, let me know!
Yesterday was so crazy jam-packed with stuff that we didn’t have time to decorate. I’m pretty sure there may be a photo or two of that today. 🙂
Here’s a fun and easy although not entirely inexpensive little project: make yer own vanilla extract!
You can thank Chef Michael Smith for this one. Beloved and I have been taping old episodes of his series Chef at Home from the Food Network and watching them on the weekends. One episode he made a passing reference to how easy it is to make your own vanilla extract as he shook a mason jar full of honey-brown liquid, and my curiousity was piqued.
I’ve already learned my lesson about vanilla extract. There are two kinds on the shelf in your grocery store: artificial and pure. When Beloved started to get into baking last year, I tried to cut corners and brought home an extra-large size bottle of artificial vanilla extract because I balked at the price of the pure stuff. As I’ve since learned, it’s worth spending the extra to get the pure stuff because it has flavour-enhancing properties (not to mention a heavenly flavour in its own right) that the artificial stuff just can’t touch. Artificial vanilla extract can be made from corn syrup, wood pulp, or various natural and artificial flavours.
The recipe for home made vanilla extract, it turns out, is ridiculously simple. It comprises a whole two ingredients: vanilla beans and vodka. And as I found out, both of those things are stupidly expensive.
That’s how I found myself in the LCBO, peering at price labels on vodka bottles and searching for the absolut cheapest brand. (Get it? Absolut? I slay me.) Holy crap, this stuff is not cheap! As I compared the prices of the various brands, it occured to me that this may be the first time I have purchased hard liquor. Oh the things I’m learning in my ripe old age!
Solution for extracting vanilla acquired, I found myself lacking only vanilla. I thought I might be able to find bulk vanilla beans at Farm Boy or Bulk Barn, but it turns out they both sell the variation of the same packages containing just two vanilla beans in the range of $5. I found a recommendation online to buy vanilla beans online from Beanilla, and managed to pick up 25 beans for just over $20.
So, to recap: artificial vanilla extract for approximately one cent per millilitre. Pure vanilla extract for approximately nine cents per millilitre. Home made vanilla extract for approximately four dollars per millilitre. This is starting to sound like the time I made my own baby food!
But, having finally acquired all the necessary components, I must say the actual making of the extract couldn’t have been easier. You will need: vodka or other liquid over 35% alcohol content, at least three vanilla beans, knife, 250 ml mason jar.
Split the vanilla pods down the centre to expose the itsy bitsy bits of beany flavour inside. I chopped mine further into thirds to make them fit better in my jar. Pour the vodka over the beans. Do not take a photo of this step as you try to balance camera in one hand and vodka in the other and press the shutter button with the third or you will pour several hundred expensive millilitres of vodka past the jar and onto the table, driving up your cost per millilitre another dollar or so.
Shake, shake, shake it baby – and you’re done!
You can see all the yummy wee vanilla beans floating around in there. Drool-worthy! Put it up in a cool, dark cupboard and forget about it, except for when you go in about once a week and shake it up. Ours is about two weeks old now and already a lovely rich dark brown and smells like heaven. I’ve read that you should let it steep for anywhere from four to eight weeks – I figure I’ll crack ours open just after the holidays and let Beloved have at it to try out in all his favourite cookie recipes.
So now you have to share – what’s your favourite use for vanilla extract?
This might be one of my favourite Christmas photos of the boys ever. My friend Henry on Flickr gave this one an alternate title that I also really like: we’re going to need a bigger wagon!
Fun, right? The expression on the reindeer slays me. That’s a Donder face if there ever was one.
This one almost went sideways on me right from the start. The idea was to have Bella pulling the wagon, and I was going to put some reindeer antlers on her in the style of Max the dog from the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Except as I was getting the boys settled on the wagon, she managed to find a pile of poop in the front yard and roll in it. We don’t actually allow her to poop in the front yard, so I have some other neighbourhood dog to thank for that gift. And we were quickly losing the light, so we had to improvise.
This was the original shot:
I loved the expressions on their faces. The dog was a bit blurred though, and even with a few other poses to choose from, it just wasn’t working out to be what I imaged. The boys had been good sports and adorable, though, so I wanted to make it work.
I started by cloning Bella and Beloved out of the image and editing it for exposure and white balance. I found the perfect reindeer, but he was too big for the canvas, so I extended the edges of it upwards and to the right. I positioned the reindeer and tweaked him a bit so it looked like he was standing in the grass. He was already wearing the red harness, so I took Bella’s leather leash from one of the other poses I hadn’t used and painted it to match the harness, then stretched it to fit into Lucas’s hand. And I painted a bit of a shadow for the reindeer. I had to play a bit with the colour and contrast of the reindeer to look like he was actually standing in the same light as the boys, and then I tweaked it a bit more overall for the bright and contrasty look.
What do you think? It makes me chuckle when I look at it, which makes it a win in my books!
This was originally just a throwaway photo I snapped of Bella while I was getting my camera ready for something else, but I love how it captured the intensity her personality.
She looks at us like that all the time, as if she is hanging on our every word. She may drive me bananas with her shrill barking and the number of FitBits she has destroyed, but it’s impossible not to love a creature who wants nothing more than to understand and obey your every word.