Oh, look. 

A weensie little bonnet, perfect and gorgeous and…

Well, that’s a half finished shoe. Don’t look at that. It’s coming along.

The hat though, is charming and well worth the fiddly duplicate stitch, and the sewing, and the general screwing around that it cost.  On so many levels I can’t wait to be finished this project. The end result is worth it, but I’m starting to get a headache, and a twitch over my left eye, and that can’t be normal. (I was blaming the new glasses I got last week, but I think it’s the duplicate stitch.)

Also in the category of not normal, is that you won’t be able to comment on this post, or on any posts for a few days.  The blog has continued to have spam problems on a level that should be criminal.  We (and by we, I mean Ken) have installed a bunch of stuff that stops a lot of them from making it to the comments section, but has done nothing to reduce the appalling load on the server.  So many spam comments are being sent that the server has been crashing repeatedly, unable to stagger on under the crushing weight of rejecting them all.  (By so many, I mean thousands and thousands per day, or even per hour. A copy of each comment goes to an inbox on my computer, so that I can read each one, and despite all my best efforts and a huge amount of time, there are currently 105 572 comments there. That’s the real number. It’s not manageable.)  We’ve escalated our response, hiring a company that should be able to figure out how to make it stop, but in the meantime there’s been no option but to shut down the comments so that the blog can at least function a little.  Restarting the server multiple times a day isn’t really working – and it’s an unfair thing to have my hosting company try to manage.

The whole thing fills me with a rage that’s just about incandescent, and I’m not kidding when I say I think it should be illegal.  Buying more server space to give spammers more room to screw me hasn’t even worked – the more server I buy, the more these arseholes clap their evil little hands and rejoice in the increased room they have to slam this space with comments.  I feel like someone started dumping their garbage on my property, and I have had no choice but to hire a team of people to lug it away for months now – and it’s finally time to build an electric fence.   I don’t mind paying to manage my own trash, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to have an ever escalating budget line for cleaning up after jerks.

With a little luck the new geeks will get this figured, and the comments should only be down for a day or two.  You might notice other weirdness on the blog as well, a natural byproduct of them stirring up the insides of the place.  Just avert your eyes. This should be over quickly.

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas around here without a few pairs of socks and other stuff for feet, and the push was on in the last few days to get all the footwear out the door.  I made my deadline for all of them, excepting one pair, and I’ll show you those soon. (They’re done, I swear it.)

First up, two pairs of French Press Slippers, knit out of Cascade 220 in a colour I can’t remember right now. Mouse brown, really.

My mum and Amanda are both addicted to these, and they were both wearing sad, worn out specimens,   my only regret about these is that I didn’t make three pairs, because my feet are pretty cold.

Next up, Ken’s annual pair of Christmas Socks.  I think I’ve just about met my goal of keeping him in handknit socks all winter,  and all I need to do now is come up with a pair or two per season to replace any that wear out.

He’s good to his socks, so they last a long time, despite a ton of wear, and that means he deserves the good stuff.  This is String Theory Continuum – knit in my standard toe-up recipe to preserve the width of the stripes. 

It almost hurt to give them to him.  If we didn’t have a 30 year friendship I wouldn’t have been able to do it.

Last, but certainly not least, Joe’s Christmas socks. Remember the problem I had?  I’d decided to "stretch" the yarn I was using (Valley Yarn’s Huntington in the poetically named "grey") because two skeins wasn’t enough for his big feet, high insteps and preferred leg length.  I used some leftovers from a previous pair to put in stripes on the leg, and stripes on the foot to give me the extra. (Pattern: my sock recipe from Knitting Rules.)

Problem is that at some point after I’d used the contrast for three instances of the stripes (leg, foot, leg) the little ball had gone walkabout… never to return. (I’m reasonably sure it’s under a hotel room bed in Northampton MA)  Joe’s way too much of a plain dresser to go for stripes of a different colour on the second foot, so I came up with another plan.

I ripped back the foot of the finished first sock (that’s heartbreaking, a few days before Christmas, let me tell you) and reclaimed the little bit of contrast.  Then I found another yarn that matched, although it wasn’t the same, and worked that in. 

It worked pretty well I think, especially since I don’t think Joe knows it wasn’t my intention all along, and it gave him matching socks that aren’t too wild, just the way he likes them.  I was pretty hard to buck the instinct to say it was okay to have them not match, especially at midnight on Christmas Eve.

Finally, two points to those of you who noticed that the sweater for Myrie has matching pants, hat and bootees.  (I’m not really giving away points. I don’t  know why I said that. Fresh out of segueways.)
I’d originally planned to do them, but then Christmas got the better of me, and I changed the plan and left them out, but the wave of guilt I felt last night reading your comments got me back on it. 

I’m at least going to do the hat and bootees. That’s the hat there, brim done (except for the miles of duplicate stitch)  We’ll see about the pants.  I’m sort of worn out on pastel baby stuff, no matter how cute, and my annual bout of Startitis is in full swing.  It’s all I can do not to set projects from last year on fire, never mind knit them. 

What am I going to do instead?  

Now that the tree is down, the wheel is back in it’s spot, and it’s calling me.  
(That roving may or may not be what I spin. I reserve the right to be fickle.)

When Lou was born I was, naturally thrilled. Not as thrilled as I could have been if he as a girl, but I’ve clearly gotten over it in absolutely every way but one.  The knitting.  As little as I care what babies wear, or who thinks they are what gender, most parents find it uncomfortable to have little girls and boys taken for each other, and I still live in a world where there are a lot of limits on what kind of babies wear what… particularly boys.  There was just no way, no matter how much I wanted to knit one, that a flowered sweater in pastel colours was going to end up on Lou, for anything other than a minute, and for any reasons other than politeness or hypothermia.  I’ve dutifully enjoyed knitting him sweaters that play by (most of) the rules, but when my niece Myrie was born,  my knitters heart leapt and out came all the patterns that I had been saving for years just waiting for another baby girl to come along.  This one was at the top of the list.  Lanett Baby #0714, and it’s #1 "White/Blue Set"  (I just love their names.)  I used Lanett Baby superwash, and I am so freaking in love with this sweater, and I feel proud of it too.  It’s just about perfect, and it was all in the millions of little details.

My friend Denny has a thing about finishing. She’s the polar opposite of knitters who are willing to sit with an unfinished project for months, just to avoid weaving in a few ends, or tackling a seam.  Denny? Show Denny a project with so many ends to weave in that it looks like a shag carpet and Denny will clap her hands like a kid at Christmas, put on the teakettle and whip a darning needle out of nowhere while beaming at you and saying "There, there… give it to Denny." She loves it, I tell you, just straight up adores it and takes satisfaction from it and well.. I can’t quite identify with Denny – but I’m not that other kind of knitter either. 

I fall right in the middle, I think.  I don’t actively avoid finishing, but I don’t quite love it. It’s a part of knitting, and I’m cool with that, I sort of feel that it’s like casting off or purling three together through the back loops.  It happens, it’s a part of knitting that comes up and I take some pride in doing it as well as I do the other parts, but it’s not like generally speaking, I look at a cardigan knit in pieces and think "Oh man – now there’s some juicy seams to sew up" and not once in my life have I looked at an intarsia sweater and exclaimed "MY GOD THE ENDS WILL BE THE BEST PART", but I’ll do them if that’s what it takes.

All of this does nothing to explain what happens to my feelings about all that finishing if you make it tiny. Maybe it has something to do with how cute things are when they are smaller (babies vs adults, puppies vs dogs, organizing a doll kitchen vs scraping dried yogurt off your full size fridge) but if you make that finishing little, if it just gets fiddly enough that doing it is like hitch hiking around the city limits for Crazyville, then I’m your knitter.  Bring. It.  This sweater did. Little cable details on the sleeves, little cables round the tiny itty-bitty sewn hems, that bodice tuck, each little stitch sewn down. 

Don’t get me started on the colourwork.  That’s duplicate stitch, what felt like oceans of it, and I can’t even tell you how long the weensie teeny button band took.  (I did it three times, but it’s perfect.) The fussy seams that sew in the puffed sleeves, the Lilliputian cuffs at the little gathered wrists…

I feel bad that these pictures were taken pre-blocking, because it was even prettier afterwards.  When I gave it to Myrie (her mother opened it, what with Myrie still just perfecting bodily functions, never mind present opening) Robyn started to say something, and then stopped. She thought for a minute and said "I hope this isn’t the wrong thing to say, but this is so beautiful, it looks like it came from a store."

I was thrown for one half secon, and then I realized that I know just what she means. She means it looks hand-made in a way that’s top notch,  the knitting is good enough to sell, she’s saying, and I get it.  She means that I could go pro, and she would buy what I was putting out there,  and it’s a compliment.

I didn’t tell her she would never be able to afford that sort of sweater, not even if you paid me minimum wage and I ate the cost of the yarn.  There’s only one currency she can use to get this stuff. 
Love. It’s just not worth it for anything else.

I know, I know, you’re all geared up to see the Christmas knitting, and dudes, I’m wild to show you. Coming back to visit the holiday knitting doesn’t even seem all that late to me,  since there’s still a big honking Christmas tree in my living room.  Usually I take it down on the 6th – the Twelfth day of Christmas, but this year, that just didn’t feel possible.  We were supposed to arrive home on Sunday night, but the cold caused havoc here at the airport. We were delayed out of Veradero for de-icing in Toronto (that should have been a clue) and our plane landed at 2am. The fun was only starting though, and we were held in the plane on the tarmac for just over four hours, waiting for a thawed gate. Another delay getting luggage, another delay finding a taxi, and we ended up staggering in the door at about eight in the morning, and after being up all night taking down a tree just seemed… ambitious.  I decided it was still pretty and left it. (For the record, the delay was easy to tolerate. There’s only so crabby you’re entitled to be about problems caused by the cold when there’s still Caribbean sand in your underpants.)

This year I knit lots of things, and I’ll show you a few more tomorrow, but the big winners this year were the littlest, my niece Myrie, and my nephew Lou.  Both have sets of parents who appreciate knitwear, and a big investment in them always makes sense.  Sure, they won’t fit for long, sure – there’s a fair to middling chance that someone is going to puke on my work, but they’ll be worn and adored for every minute that it’s possible to do so, and that inspires me to no end. Luis was the first on the list. 

I’ve wanted to make Lou a cheerful red sweater for a long time. Well, not that long, he’s only 22 months old, but for most of that time I’ve dreamed of a cozy red sweater, cabled and warm, the sort of thing that you can put over almost anything for a romp in the park, or in the house, or a layer under a coat, or as a jacket in the spring and fall.  I knew exactly the sweater and yarn I wanted, and I just had to find both. 

In September I went to the Fingerlakes Fiber Fest, and Jill Draper was there, and whammo.  There it was, the perfect yarn.  I bought two skeins of her Mohonk yarn  in Heritage Tomato and knew just what they would be.  I think I even stood in her booth and described (in excruciating detail) just what my plan was. 
The yarn’s a deliciously squishy, bouncy cormo, and I was after cables.  I thought about designing something, but while I was kicking the idea around, I saw Ellinger, and suddenly, things were easy.

The last time I knit him a sweater, I miscalculated.  His mum and I aren’t sure what went wrong, Kate measured him, and I knit to those measurements, but the sweater was too small, and it only fit him for about thirty-six seconds, if that – and as much as I like knitting for the kid, the payoff is that he wears them, and so this time Kate and I were both determined that it would be big – fit him for a long time.  Kate measured him with a generous hand to the tape measure, and I did the same when I knit.

Success was ours.  This sweater fits just the way I’d hoped.  Roomy, with the sleeves rolled up now, with tons and tons of space to grow into, which is fabulous, because right now the kid is growing practically in front of my eyes.  He makes the way beans grow look like they’re not really trying, and this will fit forever, or three months, which is really the baby version of forever.  

His mum was thrilled (and that matters too, when you’re knitting for a baby)  and I love how it’s an "old man" sweater, if you know what I mean. There’s something charming about a wee lad in a garment with grown up styling, and I think the combo of his natural charm and what the sweater grants him is deadly.

He looks just like I’d hoped.  Cozy, happy and our little Lou who.

PS – My thanks to Carlos and Kate for the beautifully executed photo shoot. He’s a fast mover, getting pictures is tough.

PPPS – People have asked if it was hard chasing Lou on the beach while on holiday, and the answer is no.

Uncle Joe totally had a solution.

I think that I’ve started this blog post about forty times, trying to figure out how to show you and tell you everything that I want to, and I’ve finally figured out that I’m best to go with an Inigo Montoya quote.
"Let me ‘splain… No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

Cuba was the best vacation we’ve had in a while.  Admittedly, Joe and I don’t go on many, so the competition wasn’t really stiff, but it was truly grand. Havana is a city I’ve always wanted to see, so that was a highlight for me, and not at all what I was expecting. 

It’s hard for me to separate my expectations of the city with the reality of what I found there, or my ideas about what people in Cuba have (and don’t have) from the actual things that I saw there.  The standard of living is very different than here. 

Like a lot of developing countries, there’s not big houses, a car for every house, a computer (or two) or so many clothes that they regularly donate to a charity or have big yarn stashes. The way we (North Americans and Europeans) live, is a life of pretty wild decadence to their eyes.

Unlike some other developing countries (and I’m thinking here of the places we see on the labels of goods we own – China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan – for a start) while the standard of living is lower than ours, there is a stunning lack of abject poverty.  I’ve seen more homelessness in downtown Toronto than I did in Havana. (For the record, the amount of homelessness I saw in Cuba was zero.)

Every Cuban has a right to certain things provided to them by their government. Housing is highly subsidized. The rate of home ownership in Cuba is 85%, although the number of people living in one residence might be surprising to us as North Americans. (They have a cultural preference for all generations of a family living together.)  They might be crowded, but they all have a home to live in.  (Questions about homelessness were met with confusion, largely.) They have excellent health care, some of the best in the world by any standard you care to assess it,  and it’s accessible to all.  Life expectancy is higher than that of the US, and only slightly lower than that of Canada, and the same goes for infant mortality.

Education is free in Cuba, from primary school to University, and the literacy rate is an amazing 100%, something neither my own country, nor the equally developed country to my south can claim. 

This statistic, together with some other remarkable facts about healthcare explain a great deal about why the average Cuban- particularly older ones, speak with real gratitude about the revolution. Before Castro and the revolution, only about 50% of Cuban kids went to school,  and 45% of the population was illiterate, healthcare was for the rich, and many Cubans weren’t just poor, but destitute.  It’s not hard to see how a shift away from that would be positive, especially for the Cubans old enough to have lived both ways.

I’m not saying all this to convince you that Cuba’s a paradise without problems. There are problems, for sure, particularly around political freedoms. Cubans don’t vote, for example, but it’s more complex than "Socialism bad, democracy good." It’s more a question of priorities.  Given a country crushed by poverty, illiteracy, lack of healthcare and misery, would you trade your political system for making sure everyone got those things? Cubans said yes, and as a result of the revolution, there’s a standard of living that means that nobody’s living in a cardboard box or wondering how they’re going to feed their kids, or get them help if they’re sick.  Most people in Cuba don’t have much (although that’s changing, as a great many of them start small businesses and branch out,. The highest income earners in the country are in tourism and crafts)  but every person has enough, and considering what they had before? I don’t think it’s irrational at all that they chose it.  I’m not sure what I’d pick if I was living like that.

It’s a beautiful place, and the people are remarkable, strong, funny and kind and I enjoyed every minute. It’s a remarkable time in their history, and it was a privilege to invest in them.

PS.  I’m not stupid.  I know that anytime you use words like I’ve used here (socialism, in particular) that you might as well pour gasoline on your comments section and toss a match in. I’ve decided to talk about all this anyway because I trust you, and because I believe that you’re all respectful and smart enough to know that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Everyone who is going to comment here comes from a country that has problems. None are perfect, and I think we should be able to talk about choices, other ideas, and the way that other humans choose things (remembering that overwhelmingly, Cubans chose Castro and this system with a degree of ferocity that makes our political support look anemic.) Also, I know darn well that they aren’t free (although Cubans are starting to travel abroad for education, business and travel, we met some who had been on holiday to Canada) and so do they, but remember their perspective.  While we were there I overheard a conversation between a New Yorker and a Cuban. The American asked if he minded that his government wouldn’t let him go where he wanted. The Cuban asked her how she had come to Cuba.  When she replied that she had come through Canada because her government didn’t allow her to travel to Cuba otherwise, the Cuban smiled at her until she laughed too. We all know it’s not the same, but their perspective is an interesting one.

Go forth and comment, but with respect for all people, will ya?

PPS:  I didn’t see any knitting in Cuba, but man, can they crochet.

1. I can see the mountains far off in the distance from where we are, and that is where they grew the coffee beans for the cup of coffee I’m drinking right now.  I’d forgotten that Cuba has wonderful, amazing coffee.  They don’t make it the way I do at home either – here every cup is made one by each, a long draw on an espresso machine, and each time with wonderful crema across the top, "Con leche?" they ask me, but I take it black.

2. When we discuss money and what to do with it, Joe and I have always put travel at the top of the list.  Still, here we are, this far in and we haven’t done much of it at all. Now that the girls are big and we’ve established that we don’t really care about furniture, maybe this is what we should be doing more of? We’re thinking it over, standing here, watching the sun set.

4. Everywhere I go, I see a plant that is either a complete mystery to me, or is something that is a houseplant in Canada – here rewritten as a tree, or a vine that envelopes a building.  Hibiscus and azaleas are everywhere, huge and treated like weeds and hedges.

  The trees are strange shapes, with leaves I can’t identify, even if I cast my mind back to the stuff I learned for my arbourist badge in Girl Guides. Oak, Maple, Lombardy… none of the trees I know are here. Instead, trees with round leaves, smooth bark, or fronds as big as me. Every where I go I look at the green things and mumble "What the hell is that?"

(This plant was as tall as me.)

(When I ask it out loud, sometimes a Cuban answers me, although usually their answer is in Spanish, and I still don’t get it.  Yesterday though, Katie and I paid a peso to go into a tiny little museum – the ground floor of a house really, and that lady spoke a little English, and was able to identify Mahogany.  It was thrilling.)

5. One of the things on display in the museum was Che Guevera’s glass asthma inhaler.

6. Yesterday Sam, Joe and Carlos went scuba diving in the Bay of Pigs.

7. This particular area is full of Canadians – although in the course of a day I hear about nineteen languages. Yesterday Lou dug sand castles with a little girl from France, while Katie and I had our towels next to Russians on one side, and Germans on the other.  We play rousing games of "guess the language" daily.  It is a little bit bizarre to be somewhere that Americans are not.  I’m used to finding them everywhere, and having things to talk about – when we are anywhere in the world, we have a language and a geography in common, and they’re usually our fast friends. Here, there are people from all over the world, but no Americans. It’s interesting – Americans generally outnumber Canadians ten to one – so all travelling Canadians  are used to being taken for Americans first, as soon as we speak English,  before our accents or a stray "eh?" sets us apart and gives our identity away.  Here? As soon as anyone at all hears North American style English, the total assumption is that you’re Canadian, and it’s wildly interesting to be a majority anywhere outside of Canada, considering our tiny population.  Here though?  There’s three clocks in the lobby, and they tell the time for Havana, Moscow and Ottawa and there’s poutine on the buffet.

8. Today I was swimming in the ocean and a pelican flew over me so low it almost touched my hair.

Happy New Year!

This conversation is going to be a little funny and one-sided, since one of the things it’s hard to get in Cuba is Internet access.  (Actually, that’s not true, it was pretty easy once we established that we really, actually wanted it, and not the idea of it, whenever it was possible for someone to give it to us when the feeling came over them, and then it happened in about 10 minutes.  It’s a card you buy and it gives you one hour of access. Me being me, I decided I would be thrifty, and I entered my code, slammed up a blog post, downloaded my email and then shut it off, pleased as punch with myself that I’d used less than 10 minutes of my allotted hour.  It would be easy, I thought, to make that hour last all week. Then Carlos asked if he could use my computer to check his email, and I said yes, and we re-entered the code, and couldn’t get on – thus learning that either you use all of your hour at once, or you forfeit the rest. I blame the mistake on what I can tell is my appallingly beginner level Spanish.)  The upshot of the nature of this access is that I’ll read your comments on yesterday’s post after I put up today’s post and I hope that it works.  Forgive me ignoring blatant questions, will you?

Cuba is, as expected, completely wonderful, and we haven’t even made it to Havana yet.  Things here are as they were in the Dominican. Slower, less concerned… desks scheduled to open at 9am open at 9:30, or 10 – or in the case of today, not at all, without notice or any sort of concern at all.  The whole system is loose, and nobody here can understand why loose isn’t the way we do things in Canada. (I think the answer is the heat, but I have to think on it.)  There’s a general sense of economy here that I like.  There is air conditioning, but it is only on to a comfortable level, rather than blasting – and lights are dimmed in the daytime heat. The food is different, the trees and wild things are very wild, and little anoles (like a gecko) run everywhere that you look.  The sea is warm, the people are kind, and just about everything is beautiful. We take turns with Lou in the daytime, playing, walking, rocking and digging holes, and he does his fait bit by spending most of his afternoon like this:

While Sam and I play in the waves,

Joe and Carlos talk about buying a boat, and if if would fit in the driveway, and where they would sail it, and generally dream about all the things they could never have…

We’re making a move for Havana soon, and I can’t wait to show you all of it.

For now…Happy New Year, from a table in Cuba where we rang in the New Year with Champagne, 12 grapes

(Carlos is Spanish – Tradition says he eats 12 grapes at midnight, and there were none to be found.  Samantha scavenged 12 off of cakes, garnishes and side plates in the restaurant.  She was on a mission.)

We had each other, good fun, and a wonderful game of cards.
Feliz Año Nuevo!

Every year I invite Kate and Carlos to a Levee. A Levee is sort of a uniquely Canadian gathering or New Years open house.  It’s almost always done on the first of the year, and we’ve celebrated together in this way for a couple of years, and it’s been awesome, so a few weeks ago I called up Kate to invite her, and Katie said she had a much, much better idea. I listened to Katie’s idea, keeping in mind that she’s my husbands sister, and this means that she’s a little tiny bit of the crazy that runs in his family – and trying to remember that I’m a little tiny bit of the crazy that runs in mine.  Kate said, essentially – "Let’s leave.  It’s snowing, it’s terribly cold, the winter isn’t going to quit anytime soon, and …. let’s go."  Carlos was in the background yelling "Let’s go NOW" and so I took a deep breath, tried hard not to be me, who is the kind of person who really hates last minute plans and always finds fault with them, and turned the plan over to Joe and Katie. 

So it happens, dear ones, that I’m writing this to you from a patio near the sea in Cuba, where we’re making a different kind of snowman.  I’m a little bit sunburned, a lot tired, and I’m having the best ever time.  Joe, Sam, Kate, Carlos, Lou and I wish you all the best from here.  More tomorrow.  I’ll tell you all about it.

Happy New Year.

Hello dear ones, and how is your holiday so far? We’re here, buried in a happy mess of our own making, up to our armpits in food and drink, and I don’t know how it happened, but there’s little pieces of tape stuck to everything.  The holiday is very nice so far, with snow, and candles and music and no end of good things, and after a knitting  marathon of epic proportions, I have only a single sock to finish. (I made it on everything else, if you call Joe poking me awake 47 times on Christmas eve to keep knitting "making it" which I totally do.)  In these parts, the holiday goes on for days and days, so there’s still a lot to be done, but here’s some snapshots of our best moments so far.

Old Joe, relishing his grampa years, reading Santa mouse, the Night Before Christmas and How The Grinch Stole Christmas to a thrilled audience, young and older alike. (Santa mouse is a crowd pleaser in these parts.)



A beautiful Christmas dinner…

A relaxed dog, who looked like we all felt.

The surprise "big win" of the year, with Ken delivering matching tiger onesies for all the cousins.  (They could only have been more delightful with "trap doors")

A walk in the woods by the pond. 

and everything almost the way it should be.

It’s taken me 45 years to learn that "almost" is as good as it gets, and I’ll happily take it.
Tomorrow, some of the knits, eh? They’re not a secret anymore. 

Thanks everyone, for the hopes and wishes that our family fared well in the storm. We did indeed, coming off extremely lucky compared to neighbours who lost trees, or had extensive damage, or are still out of power. We’re fine. The storm, was, like so many things the world offers, as beautiful as it was crushing.

It reminded me of how often events in our lives are two things. Hard, and lovely.

Powerful, but compelling.

Fragile, but strong.

My world is still sparkling, encased in ice, and glitters wherever the light finds it.

Today is a wild day, as we catch up, wrap gifts, get ready to celebrate together, and hunker down into a proper winter, deep, dark and gleaming.

Happy Christmas to you and yours if you celebrate it, Happy Holiday to those of you who don’t, and our best thoughts and wishes from this family to yours.

Peace.