fbpx

Author: Carol L. Douglas

Posted on

Monday Morning Art School: how to tell people what to do

Windsurfers at La Pocatière, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Witness this exchange:

“You should do more plein air events,” said A. “You’re a good painter.”

“I don’t enjoy them,” said B, who’s older and wiser. “I find them almost painful.”

“But they’re good for you,” insisted A.

I don’t think A’s comment was malicious. She works the plein air circuit. She can’t conceive of an art career that doesn’t involve competition. On the other hand, B has an extensive resume that includes signature membership in several prestigious national organizations. For her, plein air events are too much effort for too little return.

Early Morning at Moon Lake, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I love plein air events myself, but they have their downsides. There are often more artists than the market can bear, resulting in bargain-basement pricing. They can encourage artists to churn out quantity instead of quality. Without a good gallerist to guide buyers, sometimes sentimental dreck goes for good prices and fine paintings are ignored.

They can be nerve-wracking. I once did an event with a very fine painter who downed four glasses of wine in rapid succession before he could go to the awards ceremony. He took first place, but that is not a healthy way to run your art career.

Marshes along the Ottawa River, Plaisance, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Underlying A’s comment was the assumption that growth comes only through pain. Sometimes that’s true, as anyone who’s been through the creative desert can tell you. (The desert is a necessary step in growth, but you don’t realize that the first half a dozen times it happens to you.)

It’s equally true that growth comes through joy, quiet reflection, prayer, thought, or going for a walk. Each time I held one of my children for the first time was a transformative moment. It was joyful, but it came with the realization that my life was changed forever. A wedding is like that; so is getting your first dog. All have the potential to make you a better person, and the mechanism for that is joy and a determination to live up to the promise of the moment.

Pensive 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I had two influential painting teachers. First was my father, who was often irascible but who taught me to draw and paint with great patience. Then there was Cornelia Foss, who is as tough a nut as ever came out of the Upper East Side. I’m not easily cowed, and I learned a great deal from her. However, my friend and sometimes-roommate Peter was a much gentler soul. I don’t think he ever finished a painting in her class. He would pluck his eyebrows out in frustration and anxiety. He’d make a good start and then wipe it out, he was so nervous. Cornelia’s indisputable genius landed on stony ground because he was so daunted by her. That’s pain to absolutely no purpose.

The second problem with A’s comment is that there is more than one way to skin a cat. (Sorry, Wylie.) My own path has been very different than A’s or B’s, but it has worked for me. Chutzpah seems to be a specialty of our age, and we’re all quick to give unsolicited advice, myself included. But if someone doesn’t seek our opinion, we don’t need to give it. If someone doesn’t depend on us for support, we can let them make their own choices. There are many routes to the same goal and what works for one person may not work for the next. That’s a big part of what makes life so beautiful and fascinating.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Posted on

Old Wyoming Homestead

Old Wyoming Homestead, 9×12, oil on archival canvasboard, $696 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

“I’m not painting out there,” Jane Chapin announced with finality. “If you want to, you can do it, but I am not joining you.”

I have form at dragging her out to paint in winter, but this trip I had no such plans. It dropped below 0° F last night here above Cody, WY, and predictions are for it to drop below -20° F by the weekend. That’s the kind of weather that freezes the hair inside your nostrils and causes spare parts to drop off.

I painted Old Wyoming Homestead, above, when Jane and her husband had just bought Bull Creek Ranch. It wasn’t until this visit that I realized that the structure is in fact a three-hole outhouse.

The territorial house, c. 1915.

The real territorial house, above, was built in 1915. When Jane and Roger bought the ranch, the territorial house was at a crossroads. Much more time weathering and it would collapse. They have spent the intervening years rebuilding it. They’ve made a few refinements, the most notable being electric lights. It still has a wood stove and no indoor plumbing.

“What are you planning on doing with it?” Roger was asked. He shrugged and said he didn’t know.

The old log barns are not doing as well.

Bull Creek, which runs behind the outhouse, is still a pass for grizzlies (who are hopefully sleeping in this wicked cold weather). There are still wolves here, and mountain lions, drawn by the mule deer, hares, and other easy prey. Domestic pets can’t roam or they’re supper.

Imagine living on this hillside on a cold autumn evening, the wind whistling down the pass. Your children need the privy, but you’re not sending them there alone. It’s no wonder that the outhouse has three holes; it was a family affair.

Note the toddler-sized potty chair on the right.

The territorial house has been my dream home since I first laid eyes on it. Roger and Jane are to be commended for stabilizing it for future generations. This is a part of our history that, once lost, can never be reclaimed.

The rest of this post will be photos of the surrounding landscape. Enjoy!

This is the original cabin. The territorial house was built in front of it.
The beautiful, spikey topography is tough going even on foot.
View across the outhouse and Bull Creek.
This is the root cellar; it’s intact and could be used tomorrow.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Posted on

In praise of Texas parks

Migrating pelicans at McKinney Falls State Park.

If like me, you are a lifelong resident of the northeast, you may have only a dim or cartoonish idea of the culture and landscape of Texas. Before last year, my only experience there was a drive-by of the statehouse in Austin and several days poking around San Antonio and the Hill Country. There are moments in those places that are unbelievably beautiful, but I’ll be the first person to admit my knowledge of Texas is only skin deep.

The wildflowers of Texas are ethereally beautiful.

“You need to come visit and teach here,” my friend and student Mark Gale told me repeatedly. Yeah, yeah, I told him. A workshop needs more than just spectacular scenery; it needs students. And yet Mark and I somehow pulled it together and we had a fantastic group.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about. Rather, I’m here to sing the praises of McKinney Falls State Park. When Mark mentioned it to me, I was skeptical. After all, it is just a few miles from downtown Austin. I wasn’t prepared for the solitude and peace of the place, or the beauty of knotted cypress roots. Onion Creek spills over a massive, long limestone scarf, and the water is a delicate blue-green-grey. Above all, there were lupines in their thousands.

The tangled roots of a cypress are worth painting.

Still, from a visitor’s standpoint that’s never enough. We need bathrooms, and the toilet block was fresh and clean. Where were the outhouses I’d expected there in cowboy country? (To be honest, we have state parks here in Maine where an outhouse would be a luxury.)

We residents of the northeast have the idea that with our four hundred years of history we are somehow more civilized than newer, rawer states. Mention Texas in New York and your odds of an anti-Texas comment are about 50-50. That’s absurd. Texas is so large and varied that it defies description. It’s also historic. The first European settlement in Texas was only 61 years after the Pilgrims founded Plymouth colony.

This limestone ledge is a perfect shelter in case of rain.

Texas parks are beautiful and wildly diverse. That’s not just in terms of terrain, but in wildlife. We were painting lupines along McKinney Falls’ ring road, when I noticed skeins of birds high in the sky. “Canada geese?” I asked tentatively, because that didn’t make sense to me. No, they were pelicans. Meanwhile Mark has sent me photos of buffalo from Caprock Canyon, which could give the red rocks of Sedona a run for their money. There are armadillos, wild boars and rattlesnakes.

If I’d had time, I could have hiked, camped, or fished. In the more remote parks, there are extraordinary stargazing opportunities. Because of light pollution, most of us never have a chance to see the heavens unfolded but there are still empty places in Texas.

Not in the park, but one of my favorite places in Austin. We painted nocturnes here.

The other thing I loved about McKinney Falls State Park were the children. There were hundreds of them on school field trips, learning about and loving nature.

Yesterday the wind chill was below zero as I hiked up Beech Hill. I like Maine’s weather, but I spent the walk musing on lupines, which is why I decided to share this blast of spring with you. The lupines will be out in just a little more than two months, and I’ll be there teaching. I hope you will join me.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Posted on

Monday Morning Art School: are your paints toxic?

Sunset sail, 14X18, oil on linen, $1594 framed includes shipping and handling in the continental US.

Unless you’re eating it, modern paint poses no known health risks. (Pastelists and encaustic painters are more exposed and should follow special rules for handling their materials and breathing fumes.)

That, unfortunately, is not the whole story.

Many people think watercolors are somehow safer than oils. That is not true. The binders for oil paints are siccative oils. The major ones are linseed (flax seed), walnut and safflower oil, all of which are edible. Some people have a sensitivity to odorless mineral spirits, but if you’re not drinking them or bathing in them, the current consensus is that they’re harmless.

What can be toxic are the pigments, and they’re pretty much universal across all mediums. That includes tattoo inks, which are a toxicological risk to human health.

Buffalo Color (foreground) and Bethlehem Steel (background), and the filth they were spewing into the Buffalo River in 1967. Photo courtesy EPA remediation project.

Making pigments is a messy business. Buffalo Color (formerly part of National Aniline and Chemical) manufactured pigments along the Buffalo River in my hometown, and pigment deposits remained along the shore as late as the 1980s. The photo above shows the condition of the river from Buffalo Color and Bethlehem Steel, now both gone.

Environmental legislation stopped wholesale polluters across a variety of industries in the US. That didn’t mean we weren’t still creating pollution; we just outsourced it to the developing world.

Cobalt, cadmium, and lead aren’t going to injure you as a painter, but they can injure the people who mine and refine them. Today’s emphasis is on mica, which gives us the glitter in makeup, car finishes and, yes, iridescent paints. Mica is mined in the US, but the top two producers in the world are China and Russia. India, the world’s eighth-largest producer of mica, is known to use child labor in mica mining.

Two Peppers, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435.00 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Since the mid-1990s, pigment production grew quickly in mainland China and India. They are now the first and second producers of pigments in the world. The number one producer of cadmium? China. Of cobalt? Congo and China. Lead? China. Child labor is a real phenomenon in China; about 7.75% of children ages 10-15 work. So too is forced labor, using both minorities and prisoners. Congo’s child labor situation is more dire, with roughly 40,000 children in the cobalt mines, some as young as six. (The majority owners of these mines are Chinese.)

Cobalt, cadmium, and lead are all, to varying degrees, mutagenic (causes mutations), teratogenic (interferes with fetal development) and carcinogenic (causes cancer). In the modern world, we can’t avoid them entirely; for example, we need cobalt for lithium-ion batteries. But we can reduce our use of them where it’s less critical, and pigment is one of these areas.

For years, I’ve given my students a palette based largely on 20th century pigments, using the iron-oxide pigments as chasers. The one exception has been cadmium orange, because there’s still no reasonable substitute in oils; in watercolor, the quinacridone oranges are great. I’m not worried about my students; I’m worried about the children, involuntary workers, and those driven by poverty to work in unsafe conditions.

Brilliant Summer Day, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

The 20th century pigments were developed first for the automobile industry, with other manufacturing applications branching out from there. Because they were intended to be used in American factories, they are safe, cheap, brilliant, and lightfast. In fact, they are far superior to their historical antecedents in almost every way.

Regardless of what pigments you’re using, waste should never be disposed of in our sewers or on the ground. For water-based paints, let the old paint water dry and put the residue in the solid-waste stream. For oil-based paints, let the solvent settle, pour off the clear liquid and reuse it, and let the remainder evaporate for disposal.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Posted on

Midsummer

Midsummer, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3,188 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

“I really like that painting you did of the flat houses.”

“What flat houses?” I asked, perplexed. I was envisioning the architectural equivalent of Flat Stanley, the children’s book series.

It turned out that she meant Midsummer, above, and she was referring to the paint handling, not the drafting.

I painted this during a residency through Parrsboro Creative. The view overlooks the general store at Port Greville, Nova Scotia. To access it, I drove up a side road and painted from the edge of the escarpment, just past a very nice lady’s lawn.

This escarpment roughly parallels the shore of the Bay of Fundy. In places it’s gradual, and in other places it’s a steep, raw scarp.

In Maine, our cliff edges are made of granite, so I was totally unprepared for the edge of crumbly red sand to drop out from under me. My fall was stopped by a thicket of alders growing on a ledge about ten feet down.

I landed upside down but unhurt. After I turned myself around, I gathered my tools and threw them back up over the brink. Then I figured out how to climb back up to my easel.

It’s all in the drawing, even in plein air.

Cumberland County, Nova Scota is full of this crumbly soft red sandstone-and-soil mixture. It’s unstable, which makes rock-climbing risky. At Cap d’Or, the cliffs are a few hundred feet tall, but you wouldn’t be long for this world even if you miraculously survived the fall; there’s a wicked riptide. Every major storm causes erosion, so it’s a constantly-shifting shoreline. That in turn reveals a new cache of fossils, minerals and gemstones after every weather event; the area is world-famous for fossils.

These are also the highest tides in the world. I visited Joggins Fossil Cliffs to walk on the beach and perhaps paint. I’d arrived at the wrong hour. There’s a narrow window of time where you can be at sea-level; the tide rises so fast that it will cut off your escape.

These double-bay houses, so typical in Britain and the Canadian Maritimes, are not common here in the US; however, there are some here in Maine. We also have old-fashioned general stores like Dad’s Country Market, towards the left in my painting.

This painting took two full days to complete. The first was spent in drawing out the architecture.

“Draw slow, paint fast,” a student once told me. It’s an excellent motto, because the more time one spends on the drawing, the less floundering one does in the painting.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Posted on

How to become an artist

Skylarking, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3985 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I learned to draw and paint from my father. However, my parents were adamant that I couldn’t major in art unless I planned to teach, and I hated the idea. That prohibition turned out to be blessing in disguise, because art education at SUNY schools in the 1970s was dismal.

I’ve helped a lot of kids get into art school but it isn’t something I’d encourage today. A year at Pratt currently runs $73,390. That is unrealistic for anyone but a trust fund baby.

Instead of being a fine artist, I became a graphic designer. Programs like Microsoft Publisher reduced the need for layout artists, so I went back to college for a software degree.

Ravening Wolves, oil on canvas, 24X30, $3,478.00 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I took off my last semester immediately after the birth of my fourth child. Bored, I set up an easel in my kitchen and started painting again. “If you can paint that well after laying off for so long, forget software. The world is full of programmers; but there aren’t that many good artists,” my husband said.

I didn’t need to be told twice.

I knew my skills needed updating, so I commuted on weekends to the Art Students League in New York from Rochester. That is a 670-mile round trip, but when you want something badly enough, you’ll find a way to do it. There, I met Cornelia Foss. Her first assignment for me was to draw and paint an orange. “If this was 1950, I’d say brava,” she told me. “But it’s not.” Of my teachers, she was the most demanding, and I owe more to her than to anyone else.

In Control (Grace and her Unicorn), 24X30, $3,478 framed, oil on canvas, includes shipping in continental United States.

I decided to paint plein air once a day for a whole year, excluding Sundays. That generated an inventory of 313 landscape paintings. Having no better ideas, I started doing tent shows like Rochester’s Clothesline Art Festival. Eventually, I did these across the Northeast and Midwest.

These are fun but brutal. When 5 PM rolls around on the last day, you must pack up your merchandise, stow your tent and display walls and then drive home. I started doing plein air events instead. I still enjoy them, but I now only do a few each year.

Two old and dear friends were the nucleus of my first painting classes. Today I look back and wonder how I had the audacity to teach when I knew so little. I’ve learned as much from my students as they have from me.

I have friends who painted right after art school, but too many promising painters are forced by student loans into working other jobs. It’s more common that art is a second career. Most of us must make a living before we do art. As my mother once trenchantly put it, “In my day, we didn’t have time to self-actualize.”

Ever-Changing Camden Harbor, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3188 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Here are my recommendations for a career in art:

At first you must play. I made prints, sculpted, and drew for decades before I settled down into painting. Don’t worry about wasting time and money at this stage; exploration is important.

Then choose one medium and do a deep dive. I was once a competent musician, but painting took all my available bandwidth. That’s a necessary sacrifice, except it never felt like a sacrifice.

Take classes and workshops. It’s cheaper and easier than trying to figure out everything by yourself.

Study art. Know your place in art history.

Do art every day, at least when you’re starting.

Let your style evolve naturally. Resist the temptation to pigeonhole yourself, or, worse, be pigeonholed.

Suck it up and apply to shows. Competition drives us to be better, faster. But don’t get discouraged; there are a lot of excellent artists out there.

Embrace marketing, it’s not a dirty word. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” That’s nuts. The world loves a good marketing plan, first and foremost.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Posted on

Happy New Year, my friends

Drawing by Carol L. Douglas. In a perfect world, I’d do nothing but draw every day.

Every year my repeating New Year’s resolution is to unsubscribe myself from all the mailing lists I’ve been dumped on over the past year. This year, I aim to:

  • Reduce my use of plastic. Most plastic-79%-ends up in landfills or as litter. Revoltingly, we ship much of it overseas, and then complain that third-world countries dump that waste into the ocean. There are many uses for which plastic is unparalleled; for example, plastic wrap has revolutionized food storage. But there are places where we use tons of it for no good purpose. Despite the bottle return on plastic drinking bottles in many states, 80% of one-use plastic water bottles end up in landfills. And nobody can convince me that water stored in plastic for months is as healthy as the stuff that comes out of my tap.
  • Practice scales. I used to sing-a lot. My voice went to wrack and ruin after my first cancer, and old age and lack of practice haven’t helped. But a little work will go a long way towards mending a broken voice. Now, to find the time.
Drawing by Carol L. Douglas

What are your New Year resolutions, if any? Whatever they are, I wish you a blessed and happy new year.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Posted on

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed.

As I look at this painting through the mists of time, I wonder when was the last time I stayed up until midnight on a New Year’s Eve. No matter what the text on the painting page says, it’s 35 years if it’s a day. Now, I’m frankly too old to party except with my grandchildren, whose bedtimes are not much later than mine.

Said grandchildren (and their parents) are here for New Year’s Eve. This weekend, my other children will arrive so we can celebrate Christmas and the New Year together.

The beads in this painting came from Mardi Gras in New Orleans, brought back by my friend Karolina. The hat and noisemaker were left in my studio by a student, then a teenager, now pushing middle age. And the purple velvet and feather boa? They are mine alone. As ratty as I look while painting, I do like bling on occasion.

My favorite part of this painting is the gold lettering on the hat. If I didn’t point out that it read “Happy New Year” would you notice?

This is the last weekend that you can take December discounts. They are:

  • 10% off any painting, with the code THANKYOUPAINTING10.
  • $25 off any workshop except Sedona, with the code, EARLYBIRD

Believe it or not, Sedona and Austin are right around the corner!

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Posted on

Art rules

Vermillion desk and chair, 1965, Wendell Castle, courtesy Sotheby’s
  1. If you are in love with an idea, you are no judge of its beauty or value.
  2. It is difficult to see the whole picture when you are inside the frame.
  3. After learning the tricks of the trade, don’t think you know the trade.
  4. We hear and apprehend what we already know.
  5. The dog that stays on the porch will find no bones.
  6. Never state a problem to yourself in the same terms it was brought to you.
  7. If it’s offbeat or surprising it’s probably useful.
  8. If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it.
  9. Don’t get too serious.
  10. If you hit the bullseye every time the target is too near.

–Wendell Castle

Table with Tablecloth, 1978, Wendell Castle, courtesy Memorial Art Gallery
  1. Work Hard. We all start out bad, and go as far as talent and dedication will take us. Start when and where you are, and practice; you’ll improve.
  2. Don’t Steal. Don’t take credit for the work of others. Make your own magic.
  3. Be Enthusiastic. Creativity is fun, it is also work. Enjoy it, but do it like it matters because it does!
  4. Don’t Compare yourself to others. It’s fine to analyze the work of those you admire to help you improve your own. It’s how we learn. But be careful. Comparison can make you miserable.
  5. Be Generous with praise and encouragement. Know the difference between critique and criticism. Be clear, concise, and firm with critique, and offer it only when asked.  And leave the criticism to critics.
  6. Value Perseverance over talent. Talent has limits and will let you down.  Perseverance lets you punch above your weight.  It will keep you going when you want to quit.
  7. Be Confident, never arrogant.  Confidence allows you to admit when someone else is right. Arrogance prevents this and will stunt your growth.
  8. Reach Back. It gets harder to get a break every day. Veterans should mentor. (And remember, mentorship is not a dating app.)
  9. Be Brave, but be humble. Even it out. You are neither as bad, nor as good, as you think.
  10. Keep Practicing. There is no destination for artists. It is all a journey.  Apply yourself, and you’ll keep growing forever.

-Source unknown

Shawl, textile design and construction by Jane Bartlett, courtesy of the artist.
  1. Learn to love the process. Creating is often a long and tedious process.  Learn to love each step.
  2. In the middle of the process there will be stages that can seem dreadful or look hideous. You’re not done. It’s a process.
  3. Put it up on the wall, place it on a stand, sit it where you can live with it for a few days. Keep walking by. The next step will come to you. One of my pieces sat for three years.
  4. Some people can go to a class and create finished pieces that look done. I go to classes to learn techniques, so nothing looks done, just experimental.  You are who you are, and you haven’t failed if your classwork isn’t a masterpiece.
  5. Sometime in the history of art, oil painting got shoved to the top of the heap as the most valuable art type, followed, maybe, by certain types of sculpture. Look back in history and you’ll see that it wasn’t always the case.  Artists created all kinds of work.  Even Michelangelo (di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni) produced what is now called decorative art.
  6. Take classes in techniques and disciplines that are out of your territory.  You’d be surprised at how much it broadens your possibilities.
  7. Learn from many teachers. Even if you take away just one thing from a class, it will be worth the price of admission.
  8. Buy the best tools and materials that you can afford.  Sure, you’ll start with basic materials, but as you progress, you’ll find that good quality will help you create your best work.
  9. Women are the unsung heroes of the art world. It will make your teeth grind. Ignore the ignorance and work to demolish the myth. You know the drill.
  10. Try not to pay attention to creating what you think will sell. Create without the constraints of whether it will look good over someone’s couch or whatever similar statement applies to your medium. Such thinking will be the death of your creativity.

Write some of your own rules and share them. Also, take the best and leave the rest. Not all rules work for everyone.

–Jane Bartlett, who also wrote this post for me. Thanks, Jane!

Jacket, textile design and construction by Jane Bartlett, courtesy of the artist.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Posted on

Monday Morning Art School: Merry Christmas!

Beth Carr drew a concolor fir, which has a softer branching pattern than many other evergreens.

My friends (and students; the line is blurry) Diane Fulkerson and Beth Carr drove up this week to spend Christmas with me. While they were en route, I texted them to ask if they would do this morning’s exercises as examples. “I knew there would be work involved,” Diane said. The last time she visited, I had her do an exercise for Monday Morning Art School on using Pilot FriXion pens with watercolor.

I drew a Fraser Fir. If I’d been thinking, I’d have drawn a balsam, which was my favorite tree in the days when we had real trees. (I’m allergic.)

If you look at Christmas tree drawings online, the majority have boughs facing down. That is not how most young evergreens grow. Their boughs point up until they reach maturity. Even then, the upper branches tend to arc upwards. Pine boughs droop when they’re snow-laden, so maybe that’s why people persist in drawing them that way.

Moreover, every species has a unique branching pattern, needle length and color.

Diane Fulkerson did a blue spruce. She’d started out wanting to paint a black spruce, but her photo from Schoodic was too backlighted to be useful.

This is an exercise in seeing. If you celebrate Christmas, look at your tree and draw or paint it. If you don’t have a tree, look online for some of the common species used for Christmas trees, including but not limited to balsam firs, Scotch pines, blue spruce and Douglas firs. (My own Christmas tree is so fabulously fake that I used an online picture.)

Diane, Beth and I decided to use colored pencil so that we could work in the dining room next to the wood stove. None of us are expert in this medium, but we still had a great time. Pam wisely used watercolor.

Pam Otis painted a Christmas tree that was brought to the beach by a family. “They had a nice picnic and a campfire and left the tree behind for others to enjoy.”

I don’t really expect you to do much work today, but this will give you something to do if your uncles get into an argument about politics, your cousin gets stuck too deeply in the eggnog or your partner falls asleep after eating too much pie.

Above all, have a wonderful and blessed Christmas Day and Christmastide, and may God bless all of you.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025: