The Christmas Shelf…
And no…there’s no damn elf.
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If you didn’t receive the gift, maybe you missed the two newsletter announcements (11/21 and 11/28) I made, maybe you forgot to send me your mailing address or maybe you just missed the deadline to submit your mailing address to receive your Christmas gift. Don’t worry!!!! Because it’ll be happening again next year. And I have some new things in store for you.
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I feel like my writing has been a little stale lately. It’s lost a lot of its prose, wit and luster. And to make up for it, I decided to do a little something extra for the holidays to show my subscribers I’m happy they’re here.
This will be the last newsletter until 2024! I want to thank all of you for being here. This was the first year that I was in a better position to show my gratitude along the lines of subscriber gifts. I wish I would have gotten the idea sooner than November because it turned out to be a hell of a ride to create the little cookbooklets I sent out to my Annual Subscribers! Who knew?! I didn’t.
Did I know that the book needs to be designed and laid out before going to the printer? No. I’m just trying to submit photos directly from my phone. Haha. Turns out, it’s a lot more complicated than that and your girl doesn’t know how to use Adobo Photoshop or Indesign or whatever the hell. I tried to use Shutterfly and what arrived was a $1,000 worth of useless books. The quality was absolutely horrible and their printer/program had cut off the text of several recipes although I left plenty of room for bleed. You see that? That’s fancy industry terms, “bleed.” It also took weeks to arrive! While I was fighting for my money (and my life) with Shutterfly customer service, I happened to find out that I could create the booklets on Canva.
I use Canva a lot for media decks, treatments and presentations. Canva should really be pushing that they also offer printing services. I had settled on just creating an eBook for everyone (something else I’ve never done) and Canva’s system was really easy to use when creating the booklet. When I finished, Canva was like, “Do you want to print these? Because we offer that service for a lot of money.” I chose to print 100 of the booklets and they arrived in 48 hours.
Both of these services aren’t ideal as the small, local, printer I used for Gorda Eats: A Puerto Rican Booklet quoted me $1,365.29 for 250 copies of a 5.5’’ x 8.5’’ 20 page booklet without a pre-press (someone to design the book). The same order cost me $828.61 back in 2019. Imagine my surprise at the cost increase in just four years. Jumpscare. By the time I would have gotten the pre-press folks involved to design/lay out the book, the cost would have gotten significantly higher.
I paid $970 for 100 booklets via Canva and I designed the book myself with their program.
All the things I think will be easy, always turn out to be difficult. And the things I think are going to be difficult, always turn out to be easier than I anticipated. You think there’s a theme there?
Monthly subscribers received CaliRican eBooks and a recipe card for Mami’s Polvorones in the mail.
I don’t remember my grandma ever having a Christmas tree in her townhouse. She had a life-sized multi-tiered 1990s brass shelf that held her hand stitched embroidered doilies acting as bedding for her tchotchke.
My mom always made sure we had a Christmas tree. And it was always purchased from the same family-operated lot that popped up every year for decades. Donning its red, green and white hand-painted banner, “Sutton's Christmas Trees.” It was on the corner of Power Inn and Florin Road. It’s no longer there, now replaced with a homeless “Safe Stay Community.”
Going to the Christmas tree lot was always a magical thing for me as a kid. I’d disappear into the fenced in makeshift foresty aisles getting lost in the Noble and Douglas Fir smell while I nestled myself in between, under and against conifers trucked in from Oregon. The wet tips of the limbs caressing my face as I zipped by. Climbing from under the conifers with pine needles attached to my clothes and hair just in time to watch Mami’s affordably purchased Douglas Fir get tied to the roof of her 1988 Nissan Sentra long before companies quoted to you a robotic response about insurance liability. We’d take it back to our one bedroom casita and decorate it with frosted Holly brand bulb ornaments with gold and silver trim.
Eventually Mami moved on to a seven foot fake tree she got on clearance at KMart when department stores actually had post-Christmas clearances with 50-75% off. Now they just give you 30% and sell the rest of it to wholesalers.
With Pavo, I can’t have a fake because he’s got a real sweet tooth for plastic, cardboard, Scotch tape, packaging tape, wires, the corners of my cookbooks (sorry if you received a copy of Diasporican with the corners nibbled by Pavo), string and the list goes on. And I obviously can’t have a real tree because the days that I clean the yard and walk in with leaves attached to my shoe Pavo feverishly follows me around the house while chirp-chattering and panicking until he can eat the leaves. You want to bring Pavo a gift? Don’t bring Churu. Bring a reasonably sized stick or leaf from the outside world.
I’ve found myself decorating my shelf. Just like my grandma. Totally by accident.
I use this built in shelf to display a lot of my artwork I’ve acquired. And soon it became a platform to display all of my Christmas figurines and decorations. All of which are from the segunda, of course. The collection has grown over the course of four years. Every year I allow myself to include two new additions. I’m very weary of clutter and that’s a trauma response we can talk about later.
With my grandma’s Christmas shelf, we automatically knew to place all of the gifts under around and near the shelf. We may have questioned said shelf a few times, but it became normal for us and a tradition.
I don’t know when or how my grandma got the idea to decorate the shelf. But, I’m sure it was the same way I ended up decorating my own shelf. Happenstance.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and yours.
Do you have your own version of a Christmas shelf that you decorate every year?
In our family, we have the Legend of the Leaning Yule tree. We have always had cats and they have always loved the trees (of course!). All those TikTok videos of trees getting knocked over by cats didn't happen at our house because we chained that baby to a hook on the wall. It always leaned a bit but it stayed upright. Every picture of the kids in front of the tree looks like they are about to be crushed. ~.* Anyone remember the string tinsel they used to sell? Like Pavo with leaves and sticks, we had one cat that loved to eat it so we had to stop using it due to possible gastric distress.
My parents are New Englanders and both grew up with real trees but caved and bought a fake one when we lived in PR. They split while we lived there and I don’t remember having a real tree again after that. I have a flowering quince in my yard where I feed the birds on purpose and the squirrels incidentally and I’ve been thinking of stringing popcorn on it because I have a ton of it, but that’s more “decorating” for the season than the holidays I guess.