Idle Hands are the Devil’s Playground…

Here we are leading up to St. Knut’s Day (that’s pronounced Cah noot) and the excitement is building! For the uninformed this is also called Tjugondag Knut or ‘the twenty days of Knut’ in Swedish.

Those silly Swede’s, always looking for a reason to extend a good party, decided in the 11th Century to extend the Christmas season to twenty days—if twelve days were good, wouldn’t twenty be better!

Actually it was King Knut, who besides being a Viking, a Dane, King over most of Scandinavia, and also the King of England, who declared Christmas time would last for twenty days—December 25th to January 13th. He went on to be canonized (sainted) for his virtue and generosity. Of course this was years after his reputation for cutting off enemies ears and noses. I would guess that after years of only coal in his Christmas stocking, he decided it was time to start being nice instead of naughty.

Traditionally St. Knut’s Day is the time for taking down the Christmas Tree and all of the decorations. At one point in time this was when all the candy canes and other candy on the tree were taken off and eaten by the family. Just because we don’t have many candy canes on the tree these days it doesn’t mean we aren’t using this for an excuse to finish up some of the treats.

So the doubly good hot fudge sauce—see the hot fudge blog—has been finished up…

The ornaments are down and getting ready for storage…

Of course there was at least one casualty of a Santa falling down and not being able to get up.

And the trees, boxwood and holly have all gone the way of the brush pile. In some places people put nuts and berries on the tree before placing it outside so the birds and animals have some Winter food. Maybe we’ll do that in future years.

The wreaths on the front of the house and the garland around the front door also came down.

The door has been returned to a more country look.

Other than getting ready to celebrate Tjugondag Knut it has been fairly quiet in Woodstock. Since we wanted to make sure we avoided having idle hands we did go spinning (indoor biking) several times this week. Of course since we’d been spinning Saturday morning, we decided to go to Bill’s Restaurant for a full breakfast by someone else—waffles, eggs, potatoes, sausage.

Then later in the afternoon I felt inspired to try something I haven’t made in some time. So out came the garlic (and the wine) and I put together some polenta with a spicy tomato sauce.

It was not too shabby…I’ll probably make it again!

Today after church (again we didn’t want idle hands or minds) I had a few things around the house to accomplish before watching a little football. We had a snowstorm the night before, so I got out the roof shovel and got the snow off the edges. This keeps ice dams from forming and causing water to back up into the house.

Shoveling the Roof	The end result

After that I did a little more insulation work in the basement. I decided to try some batts that fit better between the joists and add quite a bit more insulation. I’m still experimenting with the best way to get the thicker insulation in place and you can see some of the difference.

Your Moment of Zen

Above is something new for you to try. Click on the picture and have a moment of zen. I hope it works!

Happy Tjugondag Knut!