Christmas Crafting, Saudi Style

I'm very excited about Tuesday.

Do you see it? There's a HUGE turndown. Partly cloudy (or "mostly sunny"--not sure of the difference) and right around 70 for THREE DAYS. It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas, eh?

Having none of the seasonal markers has made it a challenge to feel the Christmas mood. And I really LIKE the Christmas mood. (Glenn Miller. Get it.) It's more than the weather, although it certainly didn't help to find myself standing outside the gym yesterday in shorts and a tank top wishing "Happy Christmas" to a friend leaving for home on Sunday. No, the bigger problem is not having all those other crutches--malls and shops decorated for Christmas, holiday music piped into the grocery store, everybody around you involved in the same scurry, putting up the tree, getting out the decorations, cookie exchanges and planning my *sniff* annual wrapping party. When you bring suitcases rather than a shipping container to start a new life, you're not bringing your Christmas baubles. Besides--I don't want to have to store them for the rest of the year. So I've had to start from scratch in a country that doesn't sell Christmas decorations. Desperate times lead to desperate measures, so I CRAFTED.

Stop. What?

I. Crafted.

My friend Landee, professional crafter and blogger and do-er extraordinaire, is reaching for her smelling salts about now. I should explain: I don't craft. I'm not opposed to crafting, and I even own a craft or two of my own making, work products of ladies' crafting evenings that were a ton of fun. But I'm an instant-gratification kind of gal, and multi-step processes will shut me down faster than a power switch. You know--one of those big lever-style switches like Igor flips to turn on Frankenstein. Now picture a bunch of pieces of wood, and sandpaper, and bottles of paint, foam brushes, and something in a spray can, and a design, and a ribbon, and...whump. Dead on the table.

So I started easy. Lights, thanks to the grocery and hardware stores that sell them in plain boxes, labeled just as "LED lights," with a wink and a nod to western buyers from the Filipino checkout worker. There are more ways to make those lights flash than I can count, but I finally found the option for a steady burn. I put them in a philodendron:

Thanks, IKEA. And thanks as well for the candles, tray, and lanterns.

One of the all-IKEA furnishings in my furnished villa is an odd floating shelf, all by itself way too high on my living room wall. It would make a great decoratable mantle (I'll be getting a couple of hefty shelf brackets when I'm home), but 220v power means monster cords and inconvenient outlets, so there's no way to put little lamps or a nice bunch of those lights in some sort of garland up there. So, thanks to Pinterest, I scrounged up some Christmas printables and put them below it in frames that will hold family pictures after the holidays are over. Plug in the iPad playing a fireplace app and voila. Happy almighty holidays.

You have to keep staring into the fire to get the full effect, though, because just to the left, this is the view out the patio door:

Yes, those are petunias. And yes, that green surface is "grass."

Finally, the tree. You can buy Christmas trees here if you're determined. Departing expats are always selling them, or the shop inside the compound has small ones (flashing like crazy). But I don't want to store one all year. I like this whole living lightly thing. Pinterest, again, to the rescue:

Hmm. Two-dimensional trees. That board tree, in particular, seemed like something I could adapt. I didn't want to mess with lumber for a variety of reasons (acquiring, painting, hanging, storing), but I thought I could work with foam core--you know, the stuff your kid makes his science fair displays on. Correction: The stuff YOU make your kid's science fair displays on. Then glue decorative paper on it, which I knew I'd seen at the office/art supply store. Ta-da!

Problem: That decorative paper turned out to be a figment of my imagination. So how about printing my own Christmas paper from online designs? Great, but the mock-up I did in miniature looked a little too folksy-patchworky:

Fabric? Ah--the shopping bus had a scheduled trip to the fabric souk and haberdashery (as the Brits refer to the shop full of trims and notions and sewing supplies) after the Thanksgiving weekend. Perfect.

Saudi fabric stores are...different than American ones. Folks here don't do crafts or home decorating projects. These shops sell dress fabrics, and by "dress" I mean "fancy dress." The display windows have mannequins dressed in fabulous ball gowns that aren't gowns at all, but draped and pinned designs. When I went shopping at the second-hand souk, none of the ballgowns I saw had a label inside. Though you certainly see plenty of ballgowns in mall shops, it's typical for women go to dressmakers, choose a design (or make one up themselves, judging by many I saw), and then buy fabrics.

How else would you explain this?

Quite the treasure, eh? My friend Cecelia found this at the second-hand souk and let me try it on. (The purple is my workout top, not some weird liner. Heaven forbid there should be something weird.) Those are inexplicable little kerchiefs tacked around the hip (for twirling?), and with the right moves I was able to make a real sparkle show on the patio out of sunlight reflected from the jug-jewels.

The starting point for something like this is back in the fabric shops: pre-made jeweled bodice fronts. For beginners, start simple.

Then work your way up:

Now, time to match and build. For fabrics, there's tulles and satins and velvets and laces... And if the bodice isn't enough, here's just one wall of beaded and gilded trims in a shop with rows and rows of them:

For me, making a plain ol' tree, shades of green satin worked well. I cut the foam core into rows, the longest being the full width of one piece, then cut right triangles (your high school geometry at work!) off the ends of the shorter ones, taped them together, laid the satin here and there over the boards, taped it to the back, sticky-tacked it to the wall, and voila:

(Okay, a craft blog this ain't. I actually did take step-by-step photos, and I'll add them at the end if anybody's interested.)

Pretty freaking proud of myself. Original concept, original design, AND actual execution. Not a box full of supplies. I CRAFTED. (How we doin', Landee?) I don't know about you, but when I put it all together, I'm feeling pretty Christmatastic.

I did pick up more trims. I have red pom-poms, a gold chain, a ruby-and-gold jeweled swag, strands of plastic pearls in ivory and celedon and red, but I kind of like it with just the thin swag of green-velvet-I-don't-know-what. Edit, as they say to the bedazzlers on Project Runway.

So maybe I'll save the sparkles and pom-poms for decking out my next princess dress.

Wading in a Winter Wonderland

We have rain!

So I broke out the Christmas music and started a fire.

I must admit the technology isn't perfect. Enjoying the season this way doesn't allow me to sit by the fire AND watch a movie, unless I unhitch the iPad and put the fire on the coffee table. But it's all worth it. These things are important, you see, because I suffer from a condition unique to expats in hot-non-Christian countries. Or maybe just unique to me. Either way, I call it Seasonal Orientation Disorder.

I don't know how Arabs do it, live by a calendar that disassociates holidays from seasons of the year. The Islamic calendar differs from the Gregorian one, so that Ramadan advances by eleven days every year. This year, Ramadan started in July and finished in early August. Next year, it will start in late June and go through most of July, and it will continue to back through the spring, winter, fall, and back to summer. And they all seem fine with that.

Me, I need to orient myself to space and time by marking the seasons with their associated holidays. You have sweaters and fires and evergreens for Christmas. The Fourth of July is for picnics and watermelon. Flowers for Easter. Pumpkins and colored leaves for Halloween and Thanksgiving. Am I right? So planting petunias and walking around in bare feet in November is disorienting. Plenty of Americans live in warm-weather places and wear shorts while doing their Christmas shopping, but they do it surrounded by holiday lights and music and window displays full of snowflakes. Santa laughs at them everywhere. Here? Nothing. So I have a hard time keeping the season in mind, and when I see a Christmas-oriented commercial on a TV show I'm streaming, it really throws me off. This forecasted week of rain could be a game-changer.

As excited as I am about the change of weather, it does come at a cost. Riyadh is a desert city ill equipped for rain, even though it happens every year and when it does, it rains heavily. But the streets here have no drainage. Not poor drainage. No drainage. There are no gutters or storm drains. Let's add that there are a lot of underpasses. Thus...

Roadway flooding in Riyadh, 17 Nov 2013. Source: Tadias.com

Riyadh flooding after rain, 17 Nov 2013. Source: RiyadhTips

The drivers here are as ill equipped as their city to deal with water (and that is water, just under weird light, not Mountain Dew), and they are arguably the worst drivers in the world even in optimal situations, which leads to this...

King Fahd Road after rain, 17 November 2013. Source: RiyadhTips

(Don't assume the sideways or wrong-facing cars got pushed that way.) RiyadhTips, my source for the above two pictures, has a Facebook page that's a terrific place to find all kinds of information that would be hard to ferret out for yourself. Such as this little nugget, which should delight everyone who's ever rolled eyes at the way schools close in Atlanta or Nashville after a couple of inches of snow:

Ah, perfect. Cloudy skies, wet pavement, schools closed, and when I walked over to the compound market this morning I even wore a light jacket. I can't squander this opportunity. So I've turned up the crackling sounds on the fire as high as I can to drown out the lawnmower next door.