Straight No Chaser featuring Kristen Bell:

The party was good. The tree is pretty. The cats are crazed. The bed is clear. I am tired. 3 a.m.: bedtime.

My tree-trimming party is due to start in 13 hours. I am exhausted, but the state of the Burrow suggests I ought not to be.

Here’s roughly how we got to where we are:

1. Set the date of the party sufficiently in advance. (Mine has been the second Sunday after Thanksgiving since I started throwing them for my college interns and my friends the year after I graduated college myself. Eighteen years is considered sufficient.)

2. Invite guests early enough so that can fit your event into a busy holiday season. If you have essentially reserved a date for yourself for two decades, this can be slightly closer to the event … such as when repeat guests start asking when the invitation is going to arrive.

3. Begin to clean your home. Depending how often this occurs at other times of the year, it may be necessary to place this higher in your timeline. In my case, I ought to have started the day after my last party.

4. Procrastinate. Allow sufficient time for this. Consider starting a large and detailed and difficult-to-relocate project right in your main party space. You work better under a deadline, after all.

5. Clean some more in a haphazard fashion. Preferably stop one project partway through and leave it behind as if Mr. Clean has been swept through your living space by a hurricane.

6. Take a nap. Make some food. You need to keep up your strength after all.

7. Tackle a small part of the paper you ought to recycle the night before the final recycling is picked up before your party. By small, I mean a handful of envelopes. By night before, I mean 4 a.m.

8. Start to hit a frenzy. Of course you’ll get this all done! There’s plenty of time. By that, I mean two days. Almost.

9. Buy party supplies. In my case, this involves a tree, food, drinks, and paper products. Why does this grocery store not carry half the things you want? Are three bags of chips enough? Where, for the love of all things merry, is the vegan eggnog?!

10. Despair. Is it too late to uninvite all the guests 16 hours before the party is due to start? Or maybe just turn out all the lights and pretend not to be home?

11. Prioritize. A clean bathroom and a clean kitchen are important. People are willing to overlook dust, but they like a clean sink; remember, though, you can still lock yourself in the bathroom to do a spot clean after the first guests arrive.

12. Why have you never noticed all the cat fur and cat litter tracked all over the place? Oh, no, wait. You totally have. You just opted to overlook it.

13. Eat chocolate and drink tea. This will keep your mind off the fact that you have not left yourself enough time to sleep.

14. Stop to write a blog post. Because we all know that helps.

15. Tackle the biggest non-loud projects in the middle of the night. Then you can pretend your tears are from the strain, rather than the knowledge that you will not finish in time.

16. Get some sleep. Two hours is a nice amount for a long day ahead. You wouldn’t want to get groggy.

17. Calculate the time the stores open that sell the things you forgot or couldn’t find. Arrive as they unlock their doors.

18. Give up on prioritizing. Now you are just going to work on moving/hiding/minimizing the mess. Lacking a bedroom door and extensive closet space makes this a challenge.

19. Chuck papers into bags. Make sure you note which bag contains the important/recent papers because inevitably you will need it tomorrow. This stage is not unlike moving apartments, at least for me.

20. Pile everything on your bed.

21. Try to vacuum before your guests arrive. (This will not always happen.)

22. Try to be done cooking before your guests arrive. (This will rarely happen.)

23. Assume that any guest that arrives promptly at the time you’ve said your party begins is interested in helping you clean and cook. Otherwise, why would they be there already?

24. Have an absolutely wonderful time with your guests during your party. These people are your friends and they really don’t care if you forgot to get rid of those cobwebs you just noticed in a dark corner or if they have to eat home-cooked chili out of a chipped bowl … or a (clean) reused takeaway container.

25. After your last guest has left, collapse on your couch and admire your lovely clean party space. Because you’re never going to bed with all that crap on it.

(See you tomorrow sometime on the other side of 24.)

If you’ve been around here for any amount of time, you know that I like to make knitting plans that I will never keep, regardless of good intentions. It’s good to have goals and I like to establish plans, even if I don’t mind changing or abandoning them.

So, for my first goal of 2015 (unattainable or otherwise), I intend to knit 15 hats. The only purely knitting podcast I listen to (as opposed to CraftLit, which is about crafting and books) that remains in production is Stash & Burn, and next year they’re doing a hat-along. I like hats and I look good in them. Rudi likes hats. My mother likes hats. Other people like hats. Everyone I know has a head, which automatically makes them eligible to wear a hat (even if some opt not to avail themselves of the option).

I have a couple skeins that were bought for hats and are already wound for quick access. I have an extensive collection of hat patterns. Now it’s just matching up the two and casting on (after I finish a project or two).

I can’t wait! I’m so excited to have a new hat!

I admit to being stressed about the fact that Rudi and I have done no housecleaning thus far this week, which means the next two days before our holiday party are going to involve a lot of drudgery. But it’s when you’re most down that it’s important to focus on how good things really are, so here are three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The dairy farmers at my market have eggnog.

2. Every Thanksgiving weekend, Mum and I make Christmas cookies, most of which she kindly lets me take back for my party. While I averred that it was not necessary this year, she wouldn’t heed my assurances that I could make a batch at home to serve my guests. While my dad and I were bringing in the Christmas trees, she made and decorated enough cookies for me to bring home a generous tin’s worth.

3. I unplugged the lights that surround the living room a couple days before we left for Connecticut so that it wouldn’t be so obvious when we weren’t here and I worked late Monday night, so forgot to turn them back on. Trudging home in a chilly rain Tuesday night, I kept thinking how that would be my first task in the door. As I walked past the window, I noticed a rosy glow from our apartment, where Rudi had already plugged them back in as a beacon to draw me home.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world this week?

When the world is too much with me, it is nice to have someplace to escape to and my place tends to be books and knitting.

Among the projects I picked up (and put down again) a few times in the last weeks are the fingerless mitts I started last year. I’m up to the thumb separation on mitt #2 (the thumb remains unfinished on mitt #1, as well), and if I could focus for half an hour, I’d make it past that part and be rapidly sailing toward home. The mitts are now in my bag in an effort to facilitate doing just that.

The book is one of two I’m currently reading and the one I just started today. It was an impromptu grab from the new books shelf at the library, but now it’s coming due and there are holds that prevent me from renewing it. As you might guess from the title Ho-Ho-Homicide, it’s a murder mystery. The protagonist has been asked to look into a Down East tree farm a far-off friend inherited recently, so she and her husband have just arrived there (somewhat reluctantly) from their home in Moosetookalook, Maine. There are mysterious circumstances surrounding the inheritance, and our protagonist has just sighted a grove of trees that seems sinister. I suspect the action is about to take off.