A Holiday Assortment

being a selection of crafts, games, incident and etymology which have enlivened the holiday season for me and may well perform the same service for you.

We don’t usually have a Christmas tree in this household. I don’t like plastic and I don’t much like felling trees either. We did try a living tree in a pot, but keeping it alive proved more than we were capable of. Thus the usual absence of tree. This year, however, as I was hanging out the washing on Christmas Eve, I accidentally broke a branch off the rosemary which grows beneath the washing line. So this year, we had a tree, albeit not a very large one.

A spiky green branch of rosemary in bud rises from a yellow plant pot on a white shelf. Around it are a small corked ceramic jar, a sheathed paperknife, and a small metal model of a camel.

It did manage to bloom at one point – you can see the buds in the photo above if you look carefully – but alas, it didn’t put down roots in the soil provided, and it did not long survive the Twelve Days of Christmas.

After Christmas, we took up the playing of a game called Codenames Duet. The essence of the game is to persuade your partner to guess specific words in a grid of 25, without guessing certain other words. You have a limited number of turns, and each clue can be only one word. Meanwhile, they are trying to get you to guess specific (and only partially overlapping) words in said grid.

Partway through a game of Codenames Duet. Eight of the 25 word cards are covered with agent markers.
This appears to be the Finnish version. Allow me to assure you that we are not playing in Finnish.

Despite being married for more than an eighth of a century, the Caped Gooseberry and I have yet to attain that perfect oneness of mind which leads to certain success in these endeavours. It turns out that the breadth of knowledge which makes us such a formidable team in quizzes (just don’t ask us about sports) leaves us with less overlap of knowledge than is desirable for Codenames. He, for example, did not know that a napoleon is a kind of coin; I did not know that goats are bovids.

Another thing I didn’t know: how much fun a yarn winder can be. There is a certain meditative quality to the use of a nostepinne, but for sheer whirring glee (not to mention the rapid cake-ification of conesworths of yarn) a mechanical yarn winder is the way to go. Mine is second hand, being approximately a decade older than I am, yet it does the job with no more than the occasional squeak. It’s also adaptable for using left-handed or right-handed (the crank is in the middle and the feeder loop can be inserted on the left or right) which makes my ambidextrous heart rejoice.

A mechanical yarn winder with its bobbin, instructions, and box.

While we are on the subject of yarn, allow me to recommend this nifty circular cast on which I have been using for knitting pi shawls. The icing on the cake: it’s a photo tutorial, the perfect via media between the metaphysical mysteries of a technique described only in words, and the constantly changing visuals of a video tutorial. Before moving on, let me also note that while pi shawls are celebrated for lending themselves to complicated lace patterns, they also lend themselves to plain stocking stitch (i.e. knit every round) which can be done in meetings, brain fog etc.

For one final morsel in this holiday assortment, allow me to introduce you to the word bematist (unless you have already met, in which case why have you never introduced me?). A bematist (“step measurer”) is a person who measures by means of steps. Alexander the Great had them (very useful for mapping out the triumphal progress of your conquerage, a bematist) and the work of bematists facilitated the first calculation – with remarkable accuracy – of the circumference of the earth, in around 240 BC.

What interesting things did you come across in the holidays? Do share!

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