Month: November 2024

Christkindlmarket!

Yes, yes, it’s a little early for the Christmas season – as an American, I generally assume it starts after Thanksgiving. But the Christkindlmarket is open, and the weather was good, and I had a great time!

For those who don’t know, the Christkindlmarket is a “German-style outdoor market” that pops up in the holiday season, with locations in both Chicago and Aurora. It’s largely Christmas themed, though not exclusively, with vendors selling everything from ornaments to elaborate wooden puzzles to cakes. They represent locations around the world, also – my lunch was Dutch, my new gloves hail from Ecuador, and there were handmade journals from Nepal! There’s always a combination of well-made staples and novelty items, and a food selection for everybody. The poffertjes pictured below, for instance. Or the vegan empanadas at Fons! Regardless, it’s a great way to spend an afternoon.

Poffertjes - aka Dutch mini pancakes - cook in a specialized pan, which has divots for up to a hundred of them at a time. Behind the pan is an apron with the words "Puffy Houzz" on it. A Santa gnome smiles benevolently at something beyond the camera.

My examples are all from the Aurora location, I should note, which also has glassblowing lessons this year.

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Wikipedia Is… Actually Well-Organized!

“Don’t use Wikipedia as a source,” the teachers said, which may well have been my first introduction to the platform’s existence. Since then, it’s become a sort of shadow monolith – a baseline for perusing matters on which I know nothing or need very specific details formatted coherently, without extending much thought beyond the individual pages or the search function. It’s served me well! And, rather abruptly, I’ve realized how impressive that is.

In the last couple months, I’ve been doodling plants from different countries, coupling geography practice with gorgeous flowers and some really fascinating ecology – like the fact that there’s a parasitic, ant-pollinated plant growing around the Mediterranean. I’d never have found that out otherwise! It’s a funky lookin’ thing, too. This is the point in my life when I discovered the Categories feature.

Categories have saved this art-science pursuit so many times over, my friends. “Flora of Tunisia” on a search engine? Informational roulette. “Flora of Tunisia” on Wikipedia? An organized list of both species that qualify and adjacent topics, to do with the Mediterranean in general. Some countries have a subset for endemic plants specifically! More importantly, the superset “Flora By Country” guarantees this same lack of headache in the future.

What this is is an exceptionally niche use of a much broader application, I know. And isn’t that what Wikipedia is for?

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Pride Knights

Friends, if you’d like pride dragons, pride swords, or pride playing cards, I highly recommend you check out Pride Knights. Their dragon and sword pins currently feature eleven different flags, and they’re working on another! And their playing cards are gorgeous. Each suit has a different theme, and if you lay out cards 2-9 you’ll make a castle – hearts’ theme is animals, clubs’ is flowers, diamonds’ is gemstones, and spades’ is space!

Continuing with those themes, their 10’s are swords, their Aces are shields, and the face cards are the Pride Knights themselves, with dragons for the Jokers. And if you don’t want a deck of cards? You can buy the uncut sheets as wall art, or a large print of a specific knight!

There’s so much thought and care in every piece of their work that it genuinely lowers my stress levels just to look at it. The world is messy – and groups like Pride Knights give me hope.

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Faun

Once I’ve been studying a language for a while, I make a mission of finding music in that language that I really, really like – the kind you can happily listen to over and over again until you have all the lyrics memorized. For German especially, I hit the jackpot! The first song I listened to was one of Faun’s.

First off, the vibes are impeccable. I could not understand a word of this and be having a good time. On top of that, it’s like listening to a fairytale! In fact, sometimes it is. Rosenrot, for example, tells the story of Snow-White and Rose-Red. Non-fairytale story-songs, meanwhile, include Gold Und Seide, Feuer, and Federkleid! These three especially have some of my favorite uses of language as a craft, and Faun’s work collectively has become a crucial memory device for the particulars of German grammar. Vocab, too – there’s nothing like humming your way to the word you were looking for!

Alongside all of that, they also delve into Pagan traditions, like the Celtic festival Lugnasadh!

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