I do this every year 1. for amusement and 2. because I was raised in a multi-faith household. When I say multi-faith I mean we celebrated both Christmas and Chanukah/Hanukkah (or whatever 6 other spelling options you choose). Some of the only Hebrew I know is the blessing over the candles, but I couldn’t tell you what it means. We’re not the world’s best Jews. Just ask my Jewish Society and Culture professor and the C he gave me.

My family gave up on 8 days of presents a long time ago, my last one being what I have dubbed the Beanie Baby Chanukah, where Mom got me eight days of Beanie Babies. Sometimes my aunt gives me Chanukah socks, although those are going extinct.

People often ask me what we do to celebrate. We light candles for 8 days. We put up our Christmas tree (artificial of course). On Christmas Eve we go to my aunt’s house and exchange presents and eat Chinese food. ‘How stereotypical’ you must be thinking. You’d be wrong. We eat Chinese food not because we’re Jews, but because that’s my cousin’s birthday and it’s his favorite food. The Chinese restaurant appreciates it; there are only 3 Jewish families in town.

When I was younger I was way more pro-Chanukah because it made me different than the other students. Yes, I was one of those strange breeds who thought being different was cool. (It still is.) It gave me the right to complain that there was only one lame song during the winter chorus concert dealing with Judaism and it was the awful dreidel song. (What are you implying, that Jews are so cheap they refuse to buy a $0.25 dreidel?) If I was feeling especially feisty I would comment on the offensive use of Jesus in a number of the songs. Whatever happened to separation of church and state?

I was anti-Christmas. Decorations were put up too early. Christmas songs were annoying. It was an expensive support of consumerism. We encouraged children to sit on strangers. I was a teenager, railing against happiness was to be expected. I thought Chanukah was the way to go, despite the awful taste gelt left in my mouth.

Over the years I have learned to reconcile the separate holidays with one another. I can put up my Christmas tree with my fiancee and then make latkes. I can teach him the only Hebrew I know and we can- GASP- wrap our presents in non-denominational paper. I know, the blasphemy. I can safely say I am no longer a Chanukah elitist. I have dropped my cynicism against Christmas. I now firmly tout my belief in Chrismukkah.

Since we can’t put Christmas presents under our tree due to a feisty cat named Jameson who likes tearing into wrapping paper, we needed an alternative to cover a bulky tree stand. Luckily I had an extra circle skirt laying around that matched our purple ornaments. It wasn’t getting any use, so I decided to refashion my old Moonglow skirt from Halloween. What is a tree skirt but a skirt for a tree?

The emblems: Rebel Alliance, Jedi Order, Sith Empire, and Galactic Empire.

The most difficult part of redesigning the circle skirt was figuring out what to decorate it with. Our apartment has quite a few Star Wars touches around it, so I decided to pull that into the skirt and give it some more personality. These are the patterns I created, two from the light side and two from the dark side. When the skirt is under the tree it literally has a dark side (left) and light side (right.

Close-up of tree skirt.

Our black Christmas tree has a distinct color scheme of purple, teal, and silver, so I knew the skirt needed to be purple. I still wanted to man it up a little bit for my fiance though, so I added a black star pattern to break up the purple. It also worked well with the Star Wars theme. Since the interior diameter was too wide for a tree (remember I wore this as a skirt once) I need to make a smaller circle to fill in this gap. Hence the double skirt effect. Finally, I traced the emblems onto white glitter felt and attached them to the skirt.

The under the tree shot.

This is the finished look, complete with batting on the underside to make the skirt thicker and more durable. I’m kind of in love with it.

After having been retweeted by Star Wars crafter Bonnie Burton, people have been asking me about if I plan to make more and sell these. The answer is yes, next October I’ll start taking commissions and making fully customizable tree skirts for the Christmas season. They will be sold in my etsy shop: Glitterpocalypse. Updates forthcoming.

I like baking, but am not the most adept baker. For one, I often do not pay enough attention to directions, nor am I ever able to prepare things in the prescribed amount of time. Instead I work through a process of trial, error, and problem solving skills. Case in point: I started off this recipe as an attempt to make penguin cookies.

Adapted from Diamonds for Dessert’s recipe for Penguin Icebox Cookies:

Vanilla Icebox Cookie Dough:
2 and 1/4 cups plus 5 tablespoons of flour
16 tablespoons/2 sticks of butter, softened
3/4 cup of sugar
1/2 cup of powdered sugar
2 egg yolks
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract

Ninja Turtle Additions:
decorating gel (black, purple, orange, red, and blue)
neon food coloring (green and blue)
turtle power

Makes 4 dozen cookies; 16 by the time you feed the wonky looking ones to the dog, throw out the ones you broke or under cooked, and get rid of the ones you used sharpie on just to see how it looks.

Baking Your Turtles

1. Cream the two sticks of softened butter, 1/2 cup of powdered sugar, and 3/4 cup of regular sugar together in a large bowl. If you have a fancy mixer, I recommend using that. If you’re waiting to get one off your wedding registry like me, use a heavy spoon. I prefer wooden because it harkens back to the olden days and won’t bend like shoddy metal spoons.

2. Mix in the two egg yolks one yolk at a time. DO NOT accidentally drop one in the sink and assume it will go down the drain like any other food substance.

3. Mix in the vanilla extract. This will be the easiest and most drama free part of the cookie making process.

4. Move 1/3 of the mixture to another bowl. Freak out when you realize you’re an English major who is extremely bad at math. Mix in one cup of flour, spilling flour everywhere and finally realizing why people have ceramic bowls in their kitchen labeled flour rather than using a bag. Stop when you have a dough.

The coolest baking item I have ever found at Wegmans.

5. In the original bowl with the remaining 2/3 of the mixture, add 1 and 1/4 cup of flour, plus five additional teaspoons of flour. Add seven drops of neon green and two drops of neon blue food coloring. If you do not have awesome neon food coloring like I do, regular food coloring will do, although it won’t be nearly as cool. Stop when you have a dough.

NOTE: If the dough is too thin, add flour, if it is too thick or dry, add melted butter. You want a nice doughy consistency. Due to my inability to read/the 1 blending in with the 1 1/4 in the initial recipe, I missed a cup of flour when making the green dough and had to add a ton of flour to rectify the problem. It was not pretty.

Vanilla dough and turtle green dough, ready to make sweet sweet loving.

6. Roll the vanilla dough into a long log. Flatten the green dough into a rectangle the same length as the vanilla dough. This is easiest with a rolling pin. If you do not own one, again it’s sitting on my registry, be super ghetto and use a beer bottle.

The part that is hardest to explain in words. This should help.

7. Place the vanilla dough in the middle of the green dough. Flatten the green dough on either side (see photo above). Wrap around and secure the green dough around the vanilla dough. Roll lightly to remove the crease created. Cover in saran wrap and refrigerate for 15 minutes. Curse your inability to use saran wrap properly.

8. Preheat oven to 325 degrees far too early.

This is where I noticed my cookies looked more like turtle faces than penguins.

9. After you have checked your Twitter and made sure it took 15 minutes, remove the dough from the refrigerator. Cut log into 1/4 inch slices and organize on two baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Laugh when you realize your white dough isn’t round. Decide penguin cookies look like Ninja Turtle faces and change game plan to make those instead.

10. Place baking sheets back in refrigerator to cool for another 10 minutes. Oven will have preheated way before this.

Baked turtles. Totes not penguins.

11. Remove from refrigerator and place in oven. Cook for 12 to 15 minutes or until cookies don’t taste or look raw anymore. Let rest for 3 minutes and then move to cooling rack. Go to bed because it is now 3:00AM.

Decorating Your Turtles

1. Once cookies have fully cooled, you can begin decorating. FINALLY!

Ninja Turtle team: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello, and Raphael.

2. With black decorating gel, draw a black line around the white dough. Add in teeth, nose, and eyes with this same gel. Alternating with the purple, blue, orange, and red gel, add a bandana around the eyes.

The worst decorating pens ever. Guess which one I used a Sharpie on.

DO NOT try to save time and buy Wilton’s food decorating pens. Not only did one of the pens come pre-dried out, but they were awful and barely worked. I got four turtles horribly decorated before the black pen wouldn’t even work anymore. I even compared them to a cookie I sharpied on just to see my expectations versus the results. Pathetic.

3. Eat and enjoy your heroes in a half shell. Or in this case, no shell.

This costume was thrown together in about an hour and a half (makeup and covering myself in blood included). I wanted an excuse to wear my awesome blue/purple wig so my first thought was to be Undead Katy Perry, but then I realised that the Katy Perry-esque dress I had chosen was more of a prom dress, and this costume was born!

My friend Amy as Lily Kane from “Veronica Mars” post death and I.

Smiling dead people are even scarier dead people. I kind of look like a bloody ventriloquist dummy here. I didn’t have any lipstick, but thankfully I had a lot of grey, black, white, and blue eyeshadow which I combined around my eyes and on my face and lips to give myself an undead look. Although in this picture all you can see is lots of blood. Thankfully I always have extra fake blood laying around.

The wig and knife handle headband.

One thing I wanted to set this costume apart was something fun on my head. I initially thought of the knife to replace the heart Katy Perry wears on her head in the “California Girls” video, but it worked here too in place of a crown. I cut off the end of a cheap plastic machete my fiance used to be Dexter last Halloween and hot glued it onto a headband to give the illusion that I had been stabbed in the head.

The prom dress.

The last time I was in Kohls and saw this dress I knew I needed it, mostly because it was purple and fluffy, but also because I loved how ridiculous it looked. It was 80′s bad, in a completely good way. I knew I had to have it, and it was ON SALE. Glad my mother snagged it for me, because it gave me something to wear on Halloween. It will also double as an awesome bachelorette party dress!

The prom sash.

At my Purple Pony Glitter Party last year I was gifted with a birthday girl sash from Pokey. Having a flash of inspiration I took it, turned it inside out and wrote “Undead Prom Queen” on it in black marker. Voila! Instant, undeniable prom queen. All I needed was a little blood, which I thankfully had in abundance. Another fun, creepy, and fiscally responsible Halloween in the bag.

Initially I had only planned to be Jean Grey for NYCC, but when I was asked to dress up as a Pokemon with some friends I was 1. excited and 2. didn’t know anything about making a Pokemon costume. So I looked around the Pokedex and found the perfect Pokemon for me: Zubat! Not only did I have blue and purple fabric and a wig left over from my Moonglow costume, but I also LOVE bats.

With Oshawott and Pikachu.

These are what Pokemon look like while surfing. I don’t remember why I thought we were surfing.  Anyway, minus constructing the ears and wings, there wasn’t much I had to do for this costume. I already owned purple Reeboks, a purple/blue dress, and purple and blue tights which I layered over one another. Not to mention the wig (which I have a girl crush on).

The ears.

For the ears I sewed a purple triangle onto a blue triangle, sewed that on top of another blue triangle, turned them inside out and stuffed them with batting to make them fluffy. Then I got glued them onto a purple headband I had leftover from my Moonglow outfit. They were pretty floppy, so I had to bobby pin them onto my wig, but they worked out well and even stayed on in the wind!

The wig.

Like I said time and time again in this post, I am so glad I was able to use the scraps from my Moonglow costume, and even more excited to be able to wear my blue wig again (which I had dyed purple streaks into). I really am in love with this wig. It was important that I stick to Zubat’s purple/blue colour scheme so I made sure I packed my wig with the rest of my costume pieces.

The wings.

The wings were a nightmare, but I love how they turned out. At first I tried forming the wings out of wire hangers but they weren’t quite bendable enough. So instead I went to five different Halloween stores until I found wings that were semi-close to the shape I wanted. I then molded them (which is why they’re semi uneven and wonky, cut out blue and purple fabric to cover over the sparkly black they were originally covered in and hot glued to my heart’s content. I’m super happy with how they came out, and my burnt fingers are so happy it was successful.

I have always been a HUGE Jean Grey fan, mostly because she’s a kick-ass telepath, has awesome red hair, and has one of my favourite relationships in literary history with the one, the only, Wolverine. For this reason, I knew I wanted to be Jean Grey for my very first Comic Con, preferably one that was do-able and didn’t require wearing too much spandex. Thankfully, by combining two versions of her New X-Men outfit, I was able to successfully do it.

Fighting Ultimate Captain America.

I was lucky because the costume was comfortable, functional and I could kick major ass in it. Another plus: it cost me under $30 to make. The most I spent was on the shirt, which was $20. Another $5 was spent on balsa wood (to make the belt), and the remaining $5 on yellow fabric. I already owned a black leather jacket, boots, and pants, I just had to embellish them to get the look I was going for.

The belt.

The belt was the trickiest and most exciting thing to make. I bought balsa word and spent around an hour cutting it into rectangles and one circle with a combination of knives, saws, and scissors. I then wrapped each individual piece in yellow fabric. I used red paint to create the X-Men “X” on the front of the belt. After that, I glued each piece to a thick black piece of elastic so I could actually wear it as a belt.

The shirt and the jacket.

For the shirt and the jacket I cut out yellow X-Men “X’s” for the shoulders, yellow stripes for the sleeves, and a Phoenix logo for the chest. Since the only fabric store in my area (Walmart) only had one type of fabric in this colour (fabric type = cheap) I had to hot glue everything on or the fabric would pucker too much. Thankfully it also saved my previously owned jacket from being destroyed and it is now back to its original condition.

My Tokidoki Wolverine bag.

Since I would be traveling from New Jersey to New York, I needed a bag I could bring with me that wouldn’t take away from my costume. So what better way to do that than add some flair to an unobtrusive drawstring bag? I already had a Say Anything inspired Wolverine t-shirt from Tokidoki that was much too big, so I cut out the design and glued it onto a $5 drawstring bag I got off eBay. It was the perfect final AND practical finishing touch.

This year, at our second Harry Potter convention, LeakyCon 2011, we were much better prepared (i.e. we had costumes). Our first group costume idea (a Harry Potter Roller-derby Team) did not work out because surprise, surprise, hotels frown upon you wearing roller skates inside. So my days as Lord Rolldemort out the window, Dippy came up with a cheaper solution: Hipster Wizards.

Harry Potter themed Hipster beer.

As is my costume making/procuring/creating belief, the best part of costumes are in the details. Which is why we all had green/silver or blue/bronze painted nails, and why I made wizard themed PBR labels to go over actual PBR cans (a hipster accessory if there ever was one). I made the labels in Photoshop, choosing to name the brand after Peeves, the coolest poltergeist at Hogwarts, changing blue to bronze in honor of book Ravenclaws everywhere, and changing ribbon to Runespoor, a three headed orange snake mentioned in the canon.

My Hipster Wizard sign as modeled by author Scott Westerfeld.

The next thing I wanted to make was a black border with a Hipster meme-esque phrase on it that could frame my face, but my frame was far too big to bring to Florida, so I settled for this sign, which I made with cardboard, sparkly black ribbon, and paint. I made sure to use the hash tag #hipsterwizard on the sign because hipsters LOVE twitter. (Granted, I kind of love it too.)

Wizard buttons. Ravenclaw buttons made, but not pictured.

The final accessory I made for myself and my fellow Hipster Wizards were buttons. I figured Hipsters enjoy buttons to show off things they liked before they were cool, and also that odd numbers were welcomed over even numbers, so I made these. Everyone got three buttons that I cranked out on my button maker: “Why so Sirius?”, “Support Cedric Diggory”, and a house crest button (both Slytherin and Ravenclaw). I found the pictures online, printed them out in the correct size, made them in my button maker and voila!

Slytherin Converse.

Little did I know that fellow Slytherin Pokey had the same Converse idea as me. My initial plan was to custom make the shoes on the Converse website, but that would have taken five weeks and cost around $20 more, so I ordered a pair of green converse and a pair of grey laces instead. Pokey had the same idea, but was much more savvy about it, borrowing grey converse and buying green laces.

A fellow Death Eater.

This was the only other book Death Eater tattoo I saw and he was a Hufflepuff (there were a lot of movie Death Eater tattoos though). I suppose if Jews can be Pirates than Hufflepuffs can be Death Eaters. He said he chose to have his Dark Mark done in red because it was like Voldemort was really angrily summoning you. He also asked me if my Dark Mark burned at night, because his burned all the time. Eeep.

Disaffected Hipster faces.

The costume itself was super easy to put together, and everything I bought for it I could wear in daily life. The skirt I found on the Forever 21 website AND IT HAS POCKETS! Every single piece of woman’s clothing should have pockets. The white button down shirt and leggings I snagged on sale (again at Forever 21), the vest I already owned and is actually from the Avril Lavigne “Alice in Wonderland” Kohl’s line. The shoes and laces I bought at Journeys and the tie was gifted to me by Cassie-wa from wizardties.com (which is sadly now closed).

All the Hipster Wizards!

Here we are outside Honeydukes in all our Hipster Wizard glory at 1:00AM, a little tired, a little hot, and a little drunk, but enjoying the amazingness that is the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Suffice it to say we will not be Hipster Wizards next year, because those headbands are painful.

I decided that if I’m going to keep dressing up as a Slytherin at Harry Potter conventions I was going to need a tattoo to match. Plus it just looks damn awesome if you ask me. ^^ Momma might not have raised a Slytherin, but I damn sure turned into one. Slytherin for life!

I always said when I graduated with a BA in English that I would get a semi-colon tattoo behind my right ear to commemorate it. One year after graduating, Mrs. S, Dippy, and I went to get punctuation tattoos together. I also decided the left ear was a much smarter option.

Me and my tattoo twin Dippy.

Now we have our literary nerdery etched on us forever. I couldn’t have picked a more awesome lady to share ink with. <3

First off, I would like to discuss a new blog that myself and some of my fellow Exclusives are partaking in, starting today. The overall premise is that it’s a book blog run by an English major (Cassie-wa/Lúthien), a bookstore manager (myself), a librarian (Dippy), and a corporate whore (Pokey) posting reviews, being literary nerds, organizing book clubs once a month, and generally reading as much as possible.

So please, check out Bibliomantics, which begins today. I will be posting every Friday HERE, beginning on February 4th. Also follow the Bibliomantics on twitter to keep up to date with our blogging 24/7.

In other news, I have added two new poems to the Poetry section entitled, “The Twelve Days of Jewmas” which I’ve been told would make Mel Brooks proud (::blushes::) and “Under Mt. Grumpus” a poem that allowed me to vent some anger about my boss.

In addition to this, I read 78 books in 2010 and have written an Annual Reading/Review List: 2010, which includes recommendations for my favourite books I read last year.

Finally, I have ANOTHER new layout, Slytherin themed this time, brought on by my switch to WordPress (I have moved from the .org software to the .com hosting). This should make posting easier and more streamlined. Freeing up more of my time for reading and writing.