Thursday, November 30, 2006

Getting Ready for the Chill

Today is shopping day, so I hope you remembered to make your lists yesterday. I'm sorry I wasn't home to post. I had a hair appointment and ended up spending the rest of the afternoon hanging our Christmas lights outside. Believe it or not we've been having temperatures in the 60's...but after tomorrow, it's all 20's and 30's for highs! I really needed to get those outdoor lights hung so I wasn't stuck out there this weekend in my hat and gloves!

Due to the weather getting frosy, I wanted to remind you of a few things you may want to consider adding to your shopping lists.

1. Vaseline Intensive Care hand lotion. Seriously, this stuff is the best!! No joke! I'm talking NO cracks at all if you apply it every night and during the day when you're going in and out from warm to cold temperatures!

2. New furnace filters! This is something that if you don't know if you need them...ask someone who can tell you!! It will save you money on your heating, make your home healthier AND cleaner!!

3. And finally...I wanted to share with you my holiday spice recipe and encourage you to go out, buy the ingredients and make it for yourself. It's just not the Christmas season for me without this. My mom made it when I was a child and when my husband and I first were together I made sure to make it in our home. I made it last night with my 2 1/2 year old's help and as soon as my husband walked in the door, he knew Christmas had came to our Comfortable Home!

Holiday Spice ala Ms. Suzy

1 lemon rind
1 orange rind
1 box of cinnamon sticks
1 box of whole cloves
2 bay leaves

Put all ingredients in an open topped tea kettle (one that does NOT whistle) or an old saucepan.

Fill with water.

Bring to a boil then turn down to a slow simmer.

Enjoy the smell of the holidays!


If you're on a tight budget, these spices can be expensive. So, another idea is to put a 1/4 cup of sugar and a 1/4 cup of ground cinnamon on a pie plate and put on a back burner on low.

Please let me know if you have any other ideas on getting ready for the cold weather, or how you liked the holiday spice!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

a bit of veg oil (1 -2 tsp) in your mix will help the smell dissapate in your home better, and also spices are much cheaper (at least here in texas) in the mexican foods aisle, the spices in the bags...cinnamon is about $1.50 here for 15 sticks. I also use the peel and cores from the kids apples i slice for thier lunchbox for my smell good concoction, i also add all kinds of things, extracts, all kinds of citrus, pomegranite skins (kids love those seeds...lol) anything that sounds "candley" to me.
happy smelling
cherrie

Ms. Suzy said...

Thanks for the info about the "cheap" cinnamon. I'll have to check our mexican foods aisle here...but I know it's not very big, so I'm not so sure they'd carry cinnamon sticks...I'm still going to check it out for future reference!

If you can..email me (there's a link in the sidebar) about the pomagranites. I haven't used those in anything and I'd love to hear what you do with them!