Holiday craziness!

Merry Christmas Everybody!

I'm sorry I haven't posted all month, but I have been going a little crazy! Last weekend, I made candy for 30 of my and Mike's closest friends at work. I was going to make truffles, but Mike talked me out of those. Good thing, because I was ready to quit by the time I was done making fruit and nut clusters! We bought two 10 lb bars of chocolate, and about 15 lbs of nuts and fruits from Trader Joe's. After all was said and done, we returned one of the bars of chocolate, and between a half and a third of the fruit and nuts. It was a lot of work!

Last weekend, I was also in a mad dash to get Christmas cards and presents out the door. Phew! I had a stack of Christmas cards like 4" - 6" high! If you didn't get a Christmas card from me, it is probably because I don't have your address, so if you send me your address, I will send you a card. Send me all of your addresses anyway, so I won't have to hunt you down to send wedding invitations. I got a lot of addresses from Christine, but I still don't have a lot of phone numbers, so if you want to send me your phone numbers too, that would be great!

I am thinking about getting custom postage made for the wedding. Using this picture:
How much postage do you think I'll need? I figure minimally 2 stamps per invitation (one for the invitation and one for the RSVP). And since I plan to invite like 150-175 people, that probably means something like 200 - 300 stamps. Although, a lot of cousins have their own families, so that might mean more postage than I am counting. There is also postage for the thank you cards to think about. Maybe another 100 - 150 stamps. So, maximally, we're talking like 450 stamps. At stamps.com, they charge $15 per sheet of twenty stamps if you buy 20 sheets. $14 if you buy 25+ sheets of stamps. Address labels would probably be good too -- I don't want to address all of those envelopes by hand!

I have put together a little mock up website for the wedding. I am still deciding where I am going to host it, since I am pretty much set that I want to have it. I am NOT leaving it at the media lab website, although that is where it is now. You can look at it here: http://web.media.mit.edu/~dhirsh/wedding/.

We are going to North Carolina to my uncle's house this year. All of the Hirshes are converging on my uncle. I haven't seen this set of cousins since my grandmother's funeral two years ago, and before then I hadn't seen them for four, maybe five years. So, in my head, my cousin Rachel who is graduating from high school is still ten. This will be a shocker. My mother is not coming to Christmas. She says she doesn't feel up to travelling. The way she let this be known was, shall we say, sub-optimal, and my dad was royally p.o.'ed. But, when I talked to her, she sounded like she was really scared of the process of getting through the airport, given that her heart is not in good condition. They are coming from O'Hare, so I can definitely see how that could be daunting. So, I'm not mad, but I do hope we can find a way to make this work come July. Anyway, I am driving myself nuts right now, since I have got it into my head that I want to make truffles. I made all of the ganache tonight so all I will have to do is dip tomorrow. Wish me luck!