The Home Made Year

Happy New Year!

Did you make any resolutions? I did! Well, I followed my usual train of thought when it comes to these sorts of events, and it goes something like:

"Oh! Hey! It's, like, December and stuff. I should make a New Year's Resolution NOW so that I'm all prepared when someone asks me later on. Yeah, good idea. What do I want to resolve? {insert long rambling internal monologue} ...and that's why Communism ultimately failed and my father should give me his barbecue sauce recipe. Okay, now, resolutions. Um, lose weight. Done."

Then on Decmeber 30th: "Argh! I will always be pregnant and fat! I need a new resolution."

Enter my talented friend Amanda. She is more creative than me, she is more ambitious than me, and as of starting her new diet she's thinner than me, too. Which sucks for me, but does offer one really kick-butt perk: Amanda always has a whole series of New Year's resolutions. And the third week of December, right when the panic started to set in, she called me to ask if I would like to make Christmas gifts with her this year. (Can you tell where this is going?) Would I? Why yes, yes I would, and why stop at Christmas gifts when we could break the bank and go all the way - let's resolve to do a whole year of home made gifts!

Now, Amanda may be more creative, ambitious and, *sigh* thinner than I am, but in our 26 year friendship she's never gotten wise to the fact that you do not present a drowning Amy with a liferaft and not expect her to beat you to it. Amanda got just as enthused as I did over the crazy scheme. It still seemed a good idea the next morning when we woke up, and again a few days later, and so our joint resolution was born: The Home Made Year. Theoretically designed to make our lives easier and lessen the commerical impact of the holidays on our homes and families - in reality it will probably stress us out and drive us crazy. However, we're in for a penny, in for a pound at this point, and we have started a blog on it, if you'd like to check it out.

Well, if we want to be completely honest we've started a blog, opened a Facebook page, begun a pinboard on Pinterest and inserted an updated Google Calendar on the sidebar so that we can see gifting events as they approach. We, um, have gone insane.