Irony! And Mail Exchange postponed!

Big, big thank you to Joanne for cluing me into the Secret Santa, D-family Christmas exchange!  In light of that, I'm thinking I'll postpone the mail exchange until after the new year.  That's not to be confused with the Christmas Card Exchange though!  That one is still on and the deadline to sign up is December 1st!  Plenty of time yet, Reyna!  Although, the sooner people send their addresses to me, the sooner I can get the list going!  I'm hoping a whole bunch of you will sign up for that one.  I love, love, love Christmas cards!

I had a memory pop into my head the other night as I was crocheting a hat for one of my orders.  I thought I'd share it with all of you.  When I was little, I hated wearing hats in the winter.  Seriously detested them!  That might be partly because all of the hats we had available to wear were incredibly ugly hand-me-downs that had probably been worn by 15 other kids before being passed into our family.  Ew!  Unfortunately, hats are pretty much a necessity where I grew up (the Icebox of the Nation is the official nickname and the residents are actually pretty proud of that one).  One bitterly, horribly cold morning when I was 10, I missed the bus to school.  Since our house was only about 6 or 7 blocks from the elementary school, my mom decided that I should have to walk.  One way to teach me a lesson, right?  As I was running out the door, I do vaguely remember her warning me to wear a hat.  I didn't listen.  I walked those 6 or 7 blocks, without hat, in negative-double-digits weather.  My ears went numb.  When I got to school, I immediately headed inside to warm up.  What followed next was the absolute worst pain I'd ever felt up to that point.  It was the burning, tingly, pin-prickling, itching sensation of my ears THAWING!  Sometime during that short walk to school, the bitterly cold wind had frozen my ears!

Kind of makes it funny that I went from being so opposed to wearing hats that I froze my ears to making hats to raise money for diabetes!