If part of your list o’ holiday traditions includes doing some version of the Twelve Days O’ Christmas for others, you are now in the home-stretch of your giving project. I have just the Tie o’ the Day for that! As always! The four festive Bow Ties o’ the Day I’ve used to frame this diagram are here to herald news of our bigly Christmas gift to ourselves: built-in bookshelves. From the moment we moved into this house a decade ago, we envisioned covering at least one entire living room wall with custom, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves—for the purpose of housing our runaway book habit. Well, you know how unexpected things come up and life gets in the way of your time and your money. Plans get set aside for other plans. Now—finally—it is the right time to see our custom, book high-rise dream come to fruition. We also got realistic and decided we need more than one dedicated wall of shelves for our books, and Suzanne needs prime space for a hutch and cabinets in which to store her crafty tools and treasures, and to display various tchotchkes she treasures. Recently, the plans have been drawn up, and we have put down a deposit. It’s a bigly addition, so we are being practical. We have decided the built-in will be a combo of Christmas/Birthdays/Anniversary presents for us, from us, for this year and the next, and a few more. I think it also means we are almost certain to live here in our current house for the duration of our lives. Built-in bookshelves, designed by us, are not something we are likely to leave—literally, except over our dead bodies. Unfortunately, like with my new truck, we’ll have to be patient for a few months. So far, we are on the builders’ schedule for some time in September. It is certainly beginning to feel real, though.
