Chilly Beans: Mixed Holidays

A couple of days ago it was really cold. It was one of those crisp cold days, with a brilliant blue sky. I was in the study working on the computer and I smelled the sweet scent of orchids lingering in the air as my husband gently typed on his computer. The combination of the cold air, my husband being home, and the scent of the orchid all felt like Christmas! I felt the need to sing the song from the Muppet's Christmas Carol "It Feels Like Christmas" for pretty much the rest of the day, and my husband joined in as well. I tried watching Halloween movies. I tried thinking about Halloween, but no matter what I did I could not shake the Christmas feeling. To make matters worse, my husband thought it would be fun to make some cinnamon rolls. Every Christmas morning growing up his family would have homemade cinnamon rolls and hot chocolate for Christmas breakfast. It's a tradition we have tried to incorporate in our own marriage, which is kind of hard because my family would always have bread and gravy every Christmas morning. We have tried to switch meals each year, or have even tried having one on the day before and one on the day of. We'll figure it out one of these days. We made the cinnamon rolls and they were so good! However, by the time they were done baking it had warmed up considerably in our house and didn't feel so much like Christmas anymore.

In an effort to make sure I stayed focused on the current holiday, I decided to put together a Halloween puzzle. I bought the puzzle a number of years ago for my mom on her birthday, but she was never able to get around to putting it together (and I don't know if she's much of a puzzle lover anyway). It is the coolest Halloween puzzle I have seen and that's the reason I got it for her. She loved Halloween, so I thought it would be great. She liked the gift, but since she wasn't able to put it together she gave it to me a few weeks ago in the hopes that I would be able to.

The puzzle is 765 pieces and it is shaped like a witch. After the cinnamon rolls were completed, I decided to pull it out and work on it. I figured I had a about a week before Halloween, so I should have been able to get it done. I think I worked on it for about 30 minutes before I had to do something else, so I ended up putting it back in the box without ever really getting to work on it. Two days ago I took it back out and worked on it again. This time, I completed it. Here is the finished result.

The Witch Halloween Puzzle - My husband cut out a piece of foam board before I started the puzzle, and when it was done I put Mod Podge all over it (a couple of layers) to glue it all together so it wouldn't fall apart.