Guess what I got yesterday with my Christmas money.  A pair of pulse warmers - and I'm happy as a clam.  Ok, lets call them wrist warmers, for those of you who aren't as pretentious as I.  And before you think to yourself "what a useless piece of 1980s accessorizing", let me rave a little bit...

Wrist warmers, as far as I can gather, have been a traditional part of dressing in the colder climes for EVER.  They are a little-known piece of traditional Latvian dress, and were knitted from fine wool with glass bead decorations.  Latvian wrist-warmers were used for two reasons:  Firstly, as a decorative way to hide those dirty shirt sleeves before the Whirlpool and Omo revolution.  But secondly, and probably more importantly, they were used as an element in dressing warmly.  I suspect they were so important, because they cut off the draughts going up your coat sleeves.  Because for Latvians, y'see, the draught is arch-enemy extraordinaire - draughts cause  all manner of diseases, they can be blamed for anything from pneumonia to toothache to marriage breakdowns.  And that's not just in winter - oh no.  A draught through a room in summer, when your back is all drenched with sweat and you can't sleep, is an unspeakable horror, something that is bound to hospitalize you.  And to think in Oz we called them cross-breezes and designed houses to "catch" them!  So wrist warmers make complete sense for a culture trying to stamp out draughts - these nifty little woolen tubes will take care of breezes in unwanted places, that's for sure.

I have wanted a pair of traditional wrist warmers for ages but was always put off by the fact that most of the ethno-styling women around me were knitting their own - "they're so easy", apparently - but I didn't let the Latvian-women's-self-sufficient-craftiness fool me. I'm not having 10 failed attempts at knitting something so seemingly easy, before giving up in disgust! So this week a friend took pity on me and sold me a pair of wrist warmers whipped up by a lady who learned the art as a part of living tradition - she learned to knit them from an older relation who learned from her grandmother, who learned to make them from.... you get the idea.

I'll admit it - I've taken the easy road and bought myself a warm pulse.  Apart from the small smile of satisfaction I get when I see my beaded wrists peek out from under my coat, I've got to say - they really help with warmth!!!  Who would have thunk it.  The tight, protected glow that is created almost instantly after putting them on is truly amazing.  I actually found that they were the first thing I took off in the shop yesterday, when I felt overheated - because they really do make a difference in body temp.  I am already planning my next pair. 'Cause they come in all colours and patterns y'know - next I want grey, with deep red and green beads, like berries in the forest...

So there.  Is that enough convincing for all you Aussie craftswomen feverishly crocheting granny squares to start knitting wrist warmers?  Aussie winter is only a few months away, y'know!

How wonderful to disappear into the wilderness of the Latvian countryside for over a week at Christmas. No internet, no TV, just a roaring fire in the hearth and lots of food and twinkling candles in the Christmas tree.  Amazingly this year, there has been no snow - it hasn't even fallen down under zero degrees during the day - which means muddy and grey behind the window.  This year we also celebrated NYE in the country - I had dreamed of doing so for years.  Much to our surprise, everyone we mentioned it to was willing to drive the two hours into the bleak snowless cold to celebrate along with us -  so we had a fun time days holed up around the fire, listening to and playing music, going in the sauna, telling new year's fortunes and playing board games.  The boys and the rest of the visiting kids went on several boys' own adventure expeditions around the lake (with bows and arrows and wooden swords and mum's mobile phone, for security calls and taking photos of wild animals).

When I was younger I was always the conservative party animal who stayed sober and drove everyone home at the end of the night. After that I was pregnant and breastfeeding for years.  Lately however I've found myself drinking more - perhaps its the whole 6-months-of-cold-and-dark-in-Eastern-Europe vibe?  Or maybe because I'm working more intensively?  Whatever the reason, this NYE I learned my lesson after having a close encounter with a bottle of moonshine distilled from homebrewed beer (google tells me that distilled beer is just whiskey, but I tell ya, this didn't seem anything like whiskey to me), and have vowed never to touch booze without international alcohol certification again.

New Years day dawned sunny and gorgeous, with a very light dusting of snow - like icing sugar - on everything, and the puddles slowly starting to turn into ice. And maybe it was the moonshine talking, but I must admit I was happy at the prospect of a little bit of real winter, bracing air, frozen fingers and toes - the way familiar landscapes are transformed into strange worlds when they are covered in snow.
So here's a happy one to all of you, hope you find beauty in your indigenous landscapes, with or without snow...


One way we told fortunes was by lighting a candle in a little boat - that each person swirled into a bowl of water.  The boat stopped at the person's fortune for next year (written on slips of paper around the outside).  Both Jem and I got "Many visitors from far away lands" - so we're waiting for ya!

Our city has its own professional children's puppet theatre.  It's got puppet masters who have trained as such in the Soviet era, its own building in the centre of town, and a very active programme with a number of new shows every season.  It's always seemed super cool and super unusual to me that children's puppet theatre is taken so seriously here, that "professional puppet master" can actually be a real job description, and that many families opt to take their kids to see the puppets instead of go to the movies.
Well a couple of months ago I got a call from one of the said puppet masters, asking me to translate one of their plays that they had been invited to play at a festival in the US (as a freelance team).  I accepted immediately, excitedly, and was a little taken aback when she told me that they had no money to pay me for the job... but they could offer a barter.  A play, put on at the date and time of my choosing - or a wonderful Father Christmas, or an enchanting Easter Bunny... Long story short, I agreed, and tonight we held a puppet party at our place, as a Christmas gift for our godchildren and their families.  It was great fun.  The play itself was hilarious, with the mirth heightened by the fact that the performance happened at such close quarters in our lounge room. We all laughed and laughed - adults and children alike -at classic fairytale forest animals were infused with naivity, slyness, fun and comedy.
So good, that I'm hoping I get another barter deal from them again, so we can have another Christmas play next year!

Last year, when we were in the last throes of finishing off our house, I made a vow that on the next Christmas I would go into "pretty homemaker" mode.  I promised myself that I would have a triangle of advent candlesticks in every window, and that the apple tree in the back would be a mass of twinkling fairy lights.  I was going to have a big Christmas tree in Riga and another one in the country.  Oh, and choirs of angels singing all December, and a permanent freshly baked gingerbread aroma wafting from the kitchen.  So as Christmas  approached this year, and I watched November swallowed up by work trips, and made plans for exhibition openings, I realized that my American dream home Christmas special was going to have to be trimmed - and I don't mean the tinsel and baubles kind of trimming...

At any rate, we ended up getting a couple of triangle advent candlesticks (ok, so they are faux candlesticks these days with electric bulbs).  They are the most wonderful part of solidarity in Riga at this time of year.  The darkness is so all-pervading - I swear this morning daylight only fully appeared around 9am, and at 4pm it was already dusk.  So after dusk (and many people just leave them on all day) - many, many shops and houses and apartments switch on their golden sparkly advent candlesticks in the window.  Gives a bit of warm glow both inside the house and out.  Driving along the road in the almost permanent darkness, the little lights in everyone's windows lifts your mood.  Or at least they lift MY mood.

The apple tree lights seemed like way too much logistical effort for our work-addled brains, and as for the big Christmas tree - I settled for a smallish fir tree, in a pot.  I bought it with the boys at the local craft markets last Saturday, and rashly (and proudly) told the man selling them that I would carry it home by myself.  He offered to take it in his truck.  "Oh no!" I scoffed.  "I've carried children around for the last 9 years!  I'm strong as an ox!" and proceeded to have my arms almost drop off over staggering home 5 blocks through the sleet.  Anyhow, on getting it home, I realised that our city abode has no Christmas decorations to put on the tree.  And this, dear reader, is where this whole waffling post was going.  To my brush with the magical disappearing antique shop (cue Harry Potter music).

By chance, I stumbled into the magical disappearing antique shop a few roads up from our place when walking to kindergarten one day.  A brand new shop, never knew it was there, I ducked in and snooped around, and spied the big bowl of old Soviet glass Christmas ornaments for a laughable price per piece, noted them, and went on my merry way.  Well last Saturday, after realizing that we had no Christmas ornaments in the house, I made a beeline back to the antique store....   and it was gone.  I'm not saying it had closed up and moved away - it had completely disappeared.  I couldn't even find the building where it had been.  There was the photo salon, and the fruiterer, and the hairdressers, but the antique shop - in fact the whole building - had vanished.  Freaky.  In the following days I walked or drove up the street a few times, wondering if the shop had all been a part of my overactive imagination.  I could never find it, nor any sign on any of the buildings heralding an antique store.  Then, today, coming back from the tram stop with Tiss, there appeared a quaint, squat little wooden house with shutters and lit windows - the antique store was back!  Without further ado we crashed in there, made straight for the bowl of ornaments - which was, amazingly, still full of glass baubles, and picked out the best of the bunch.  Totally wondrous. The bearded shopkeeper, who looked like a friendly Hobbit in a flannel shirt, smiled knowingly when I told him I had lost his store, and silently wrapped the ornaments in scraps of old Soviet newspaper.

So now they are hanging on our tree.  Still need to find a star for the top.  I've got to say - I love those ornaments.  The pics don't do them justice - many of them are clear glass, with shiny colour painted on the back, so that in real life the baubles have real depth and mystery when you look at them.  Mind you, I know that certain readers will find the ornaments shabby, or too much reminiscent of their own Soviet Christmases.  But for me, they are just perfect.  Part of the sparkly lit up Christmas miracle...

 For us eastern Europeans, walking over mangoes and avocados on the ground, dropped from the trees like apples in autumn, was heart wrenching.  The mangos we gathered up and broke open with our fingers, inhaling the contents...