Introducing Marzipan and Mistletoe

My next seasonal notebook, running throughout December.

All year, I have known what my December seasonal notebook would be focussed upon, I just didn’t know what I wanted it to be called.

Marzipan and Mistletoe will be a simple, photo-a-day notebook, sharing images of our first Christmas in our new home. There will likely be a sentence or two for context, but I doubt there will be much more than that. (Though, I do realise that every time I have tried to keep things simple and short, they have grown legs – so this is a guide rather than anything else.)

It has been a mad year, and I am very excited about relaxing into the season. At least, as much as we relax in this family.

Choosing the name for this notebook took some time. Being a Crow (the only two-legged one in my household), I have been known to refer to Christmasses with my own family as “Crowmas”. When we lived in Croy, I coined the word “Croymas”. Neither of these would have worked, for obvious reasons. At times, we collectively refer to our family as “Crowditch”, and I debated that, but “A Crowditch Christmas” didn’t have the specific ring I wanted for this year’s visual theme. I thought about something based on the name of our house, but decided against that. I considered using the suffix “tide”, but Christmastide has a specific liturgical meaning (and does not run throughout the whole of the month of December), and Decembertide is, well, just December.

Eventually, I focussed on an alliterative approach (as you may have guessed, I do love alliteration!*) with two words I enjoy that would immediately conjure up the season.

Never let it be said that I don’t put thought into these things.

Before I leave you to your November, I have three final pieces of news. Firstly, I enjoyed my September notebook so much, that I have decided to continue sharing little snippets every now and then by way of an old-school newsletter. A message will be sent out each New Moon, starting on the first day of December. Everyone is so busy, I don’t think it needs to be any more frequent than that . If you are so inclined, you can sign up to follow along here. Secondly, and very excitingly (for me at least, even if not for anyone else), I have decided to run a year-long project, featuring suggestions of fun and interesting things to do. Expect bursts of nostalgia, old-fashioned fun in its simplest state, and a not insignificant amount of cheerful daftness. An introductory post will be shared on the 1st of December 2024, and a year of weekly posts will be shared from the 1st of January 2025. Finally, after much debating, and with a digital sigh in the direction of whomever has been messing with the Substack Notes feed, I have created a profile on BlueSky. Please do pop by and say hello, if you are over there. I will still be using Substack Notes, but the recent algorithmic changes haven’t been great, and have made it harder to see what the people I follow have been saying when.

I’ll see you all on the first of December.

Lydia Crow
The Highlands, Scotland

*Especially a nice alliterative pairing – I think this stems from a poem “Of Rainbows and Rosehips” in a much-loved book I was given as a child. I loved it so much, that my sister, Diff, later found a copy to create a montage out of some of the illustrations as a present. It now hangs in what I think of as my mini-gallery on our stairs.