Happy St. Nicholas' day. (In some cultures, this is the day when children get small gifts...mostly candy and such).

Karin, thanks for the e-card!

Today was also my college's annual potluck luncheon. I enjoy things like that. I get along well with most people (and it seems that the people I don't get along well with often tend to be the sort of people who don't enjoy things like potlucks so they stay away). It's a chance to see people I don't often get to see (even though we're on the same campus) and get a more interesting lunch than I normally get. And it's just fun. It's something different, and that makes it enjoyable.

Tonight is also the AAUW Christmas party, which will also be fun.

I made the "Cowboy Caviar" (marinated black beans, black olives, and onions on a base of cream cheese) for the potluck; for AAUW I'm going to make a variant on Chex mix (it's called "Honey Cardamom Crunch - it's rice Chex and little pretzels and almonds flavored with a butter/honey/brown sugar/cardamom mix. And then when it's done you put in dry cranberries. And I am also adding (tho' the recipe doesn't call for it) white chocolate chocolate chips, because that seemed festive and would make it more like the dessert it is).

It's kind of hard to believe but in just about 10 days I will be off for Christmas break. I am looking forward to it. This last week has been kind of a big push in terms of grading, make-ups for people who were sick, search committee meetings (I'm on a search committee for a new library employee*), writing exams...

(*and a surprise, here? In at least some areas of library science there are actually unfilled positions because there's a shortage of people with the appropriate training. I guess I'm so used to academic jobs being a shark pool that I didn't realize there were some fields that didn't have enough graduates. Oddly enough, I kind of reserve library science in the back of my head as the "nuclear option" if I totally freak out and decide I can't teach any more - go back to school and do what's necessary to get a MLIS degree [which would essentially mean redoing much of undergrad work because I never took any coursework in that area, but still]. So I guess it remains an option on the table if some semester I get one too many, "I know the final exam is over, but is there any way I can earn some extra credit to pass the class" calls and I decide that I'm done with being a professor. Yes, I realize there's probably a lot about the job that's not desirable that I don't know about, but some days, the thought of a career where much of my time would be spent in nice, quiet library stacks has a certain appeal)

Saturday is the annual "Rankin-Bass Christmas Special Blowout" or whatever they call it on ABC Family. I plan to watch. I may bake cookies too (next week is traditionally a snack week in my department).

I kind of enjoy the odd mix of drawing inward (staying home and knitting or baking cookies) and reaching outward (more parties in these two weeks than the whole rest of the year) that this season is. It's kind of like looking around at the world, and going, "There's a lot of bad stuff out there but I can gather up a lot of good stuff and both enjoy it myself and spread it around so others get to enjoy it" And it seems like this time of the year is the right time to do that.

Not sure what kind of cookies to make - I have a fudgy oat bar recipe somewhere that my mom sent me, that's almost like some absolutely fantastic cookies I used to buy at the Farmer's Market in Ann Arbor - it's sort of a sweet, brown-sugary base, topped with a chocolate and condensed milk mixture (it's almost like a poor-man's form of ganache) and then topped with an oat struesel. I should see if I can locate that and make those for my department.

I also bought a bag of the new "holiday" Hershey's Kisses - they're white chocolate with peppermint. If I have enough left I could do a small batch of chocolate cookies and put a peppermint kiss in the middle of each one (like the peanut blossom cookies you do with the chocolate kisses). (I ate a few of the kisses and then decided I wasn't that nuts about them - probably 9/10 of the bag is left).

I might also do the chai-inspired cookies from the new Cooking Light, but it's my experience that the plainer, not-chocolate cookies tend not to get eaten up around the department. Too bad; I might still make them because I like the spices in chai and the cookies sound interesting (they're a refrigerator type cookie, so it will be my first foray into that medium- where you roll out logs of cookie dough and then chill them).