*Image above from Jackie Greaney.
**Today is Small Business Saturday! I shared some of my favorite small business gift ideas here, and also want to shine a spot on my girlfriend Liz, who has just launched a business selling the most adorable themed sensory kits. Her husband’s family owns Burke Candy in Wisconsin and so she even has a cute holiday bark-making kit featuring Burke Candy caramel — such a cute weekend activity for little ones! You might also want to check out some of my recent Women of Substance, most of whom are founders of small businesses!
My Latest Snag: My Holiday Dress.
My main shopping activities this week entailed finishing up my holiday shopping thanks to all of the incredible Black Friday / Cyber Week deals, but can’t publish too many specifics because many of my loved ones read this daily…instead, I will just say that I did buy my Christmas dress (currently 40% off)! More contenders here, and how amazing is this Coca-Cola red SP (on super sale) and this tiered maxi in a similar hue (almost like wearing a nightgown to the dining room table) as late-stage entrants for your consideration? Saloni also brought back their stunning velvet bow-front Camille gown from last season and it was highly tempting…but I’d been eyeing that fierce SP for awhile and couldn’t say no. (Wouldn’t it be dreamy with these?)
I also treated myself to this Bobbi Brown extra lip tint trio, on super sale (with current promotion, each comes out to like $14 — normally $29 apiece!)
You’re Sooooo Popular: Silhouette Ornaments.
The most popular items on le blog this week:
+Sweetest silhouette ornaments — amazing gift for new parents, or grandparents!
+Le sequined midi dress. I think we will all be wearing this on NYE? Did I mention it’s under $60?
+Chic raffia coffee table (currently 20% off).
+Rattan baby doll pram. (At time of writing this, on rare sale for 30% off.)
+A chic plaid shirt dress. Gussy this up with velvet heels or a padded velvet headband to make it feel fresh.
+A few sizes left on this chic paneled fur vest! (On sale!)
Weekend Musings: Footnotes and Endnotes.
I’m listening to Obama’s new memoir at the moment and there is a provoking throwaway comment he makes early on in the narrative: “I’ve always hated footnotes and endnotes.” I wrote it down in my little “Bric a Brac” notebook, which is littered with half-formed thoughts, words I like or have recently discovered and am desperate to try on for size, ideas for blog posts, shopping lists, to-dos, quotes. I appreciated the implied tidiness and near-rectitude of the assertion: if something’s worth saying, why not fold it into the body of the oeuvre? Why deliberately relegate it to a space that I, for one, occasionally discard as unnecessary, depending on how much I am liking — or how much I need — the text at hand? The mechanics of the footnote or endnote require something extra of the reader: an unceremonious departure from the text to flip to a different part of the book, then the jostling back and forth between wheat and chaff to confirm understanding, before reabsorption into the text proper. They are, in other words, an interruption, and most of those feel unwelcome in these parts.
At the same time: they serve a purpose. There are times where a brief ancillary history might prove beneficial to the reader, but would interrupt the flow of writing, or detract too much from the central argument.
Just on the heels of this musing, a quote I once heard attributed to Junot Diaz materialized; I am botching it here, as I cannot track it down online, but it went something like: “I like to write between the cracks.” Meaning, in the context of the interview, that he was principally interested in the hidden, discarded, broken bits — the people and places and thoughts and spaces that do not look like smooth pavement, and that are often overlooked because of it. You might say that Junot Diaz writes in the footnotes and endnotes, or is making some statement about their positioning as such.
And just on the heels of that: memories of reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which is a book that takes place almost entirely in the footnotes. (It consists of a 999-line poem, and the rest is fictionalized front and back matter — where the heft of Nabokov’s intellectual work emerges.) Nabokov was inviting us here, as elsewhere in his work, to investigate the role of the reader, the author, and the conventions to which both are beholden.
Stringing my way through these thoughts yielded no grand insight — just a pleasant, scenic intellectual perambulation. But I appreciated the invitation to think for a minute about some of the mechanics and scaffolding I take for granted in my chosen art form.
Post-Scripts: Santa Glasses.
+Cutest Santa glasses for holiday old-fashioneds.
+Apparently this $229 accent chair is one of Target’s most popular items — currently a few available!
+Sally La Pointe vibes for $50. (And the real deal is also on sale!)
+Sweet hand towels for a little girl’s bathroom.
+Mini loves this little illustrated yoga book. How cute would this yoga mat be for her?
+I saw the COOLEST girl running in the park the other day wearing #allblackeverything with these throwback-style Nike tube socks and I literally went home and ordered the same.
+Sweet fair isle knit playsuit for a little one.
+Gorgeous Bottega-style pouch for under $100.
+Speaking of interesting bags, I have been seeing J W Anderson bags popping up on street style blogs. Love this style.
+20% off the chicest velvet flat mules! (In case you missed out on my beloved Birdie house slippers.)
+Tidy hyacinth bins for organizing a pantry or linen closet.
+Such a fun top. I’m obsessed with the brand La Double J.