I've been having so much fun with this little DIY project that I had to share it with all of you because I know you will love it, too.  These beautiful "snow" candles are pretty, easy and cheap to make.

I love sharing fun things I have found with you all and so I thought I would post a few things for Christmas that I'm either enjoying now or plan to make myself.  So here are a few fun links for Christmas:

These candy cane marshmallows from Martha Stewart would be a nice little DIY gift to give out:

We're on the home stretch for the holidays now.  Our older boys will soon be home from college and there's lots of menus to plan.  They both have birthdays in December, we have our big annual Christmas Eve open house to plan for and then out of town guests coming right after Christmas.  There's a couple of favorites that I plan to include in the Christmas Eve buffet - Sicilian Arancine, Pine Nut Croccante and these wonderful Sparkling Cranberries from Heidi that are so beautiful to put out in a big bowl.  Please look to the bottom of this post for some additional holiday links that I thought you might like.  They are worth checking out.

Merry Christmas!  I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. As I've written before, every year we give a little Christmas Eve party and I give out some kind of homemade goodie at the end of the evening.  This year I wanted to do the fun DIY thing of making your own vanilla extract.  I go through so much vanilla extract and the good stuff is so expensive.  I love the idea of making your own from good vanilla beans and then just adding vodka to it to keep it going - after all, that's all vanilla extract is, really - alcohol and vanilla beans.   All you do is pour unflavored vodka into a glass jar, cut a couple of vanilla beans in half and then split them and stick them into the bottle.  You need to let this steep for a couple of months until it is ready to use.  I started all these bottles in October, to give out at Christmas. So everyone got a bottle of vanilla extract and a little bag of caramels topped with Sicilian Sea Salt, which I made.

Well, the holidays are fast approaching - do you have your menus figured out yet? I have two boys coming home from college in the next week, both of whom have birthdays, and we give a big Christmas Eve party every year. It's a lot of food planning.  I've had cookbook reviews to do, I've been writing Christmas cards, baking a lot and buying and wrapping gifts.  But I did manage to finish this purple scarf I've been knitting for quite some time.  It's made out of Malabrigo (indigo 88) and it's super soft and very fun to wear.   Just had to show that in case we have any knitters out there.