Happy Shopping

Saturday was a holiday shopping day for me. I like internet shopping because there aren't the crowds I didn't enjoy shopping in before the wheelchair. But honestly, I do miss the decorated malls and the peppermint lattes!

I would have been exhausted doing everything I did in person. I started surfing around noon. David was home so we shared talk, music and meals. There is no way he'd spend the whole day Christmas shopping with me and not be miserable. With me cyber shopping, he could play poker online and I could still show him things I saw in stores. I enjoyed the social part of shopping and he didn't have to step foot in the estrogen-filled stadium of "shop til you drop."

I'm doing Secret Santa with a women's group I'm in. My Santee is someone I've never met before. It's just like the Secret Santa Soirée was done only I don't have years of her blog to get to know the person I'm giving to. I just have her Facebook wall. We life-bloggers and craft bloggers share more details about our passions and preferences than is usually shared on Facebook. Still, between the Facebook Wall and her paragraph about who she is and the things she likes I was able to have several ideas that I could pursue to find just the right gift. I found it around 11 o'clock Saturday night. There was one other person that I was shopping for but I knew what I wanted to get, down to two possible pictures of it in my mind. I found one of the pictures I had in mind after a couple of hours but, as is a regular shopping thing, I found something else that I just loved. I hope it's opened with as big a smile as it gave me to find it. I'm behind on my page-a-day scrap goal for December already, but it was totally worth it to spend a day traveling all over internet stores and finding the right gifts for two different people!


When shopping the specialty stores to collect my traditional Italian goodies and other special things for the holidays, I like to find occasional edible presents and I also like to try something new myself. In years past I tried cranberry mustard, rum cake cookies and even chicken tortellini.

This year I tried a jar of creama di pistacchio, pistachio cream, from Supermarket Italy. At first glance, it's a jar of green goo. It's greener than I was expecting from the photograph online but since it was creamier, than Lake Erie water during an algae bloom, I decided I wasn't so grossed out that I couldn't give it a try.

O-M-G... I swiped my finger on the pistachio cream that was on the lid and the taste is amazing! If you like pistachios imagine peanut butter only with pistachios. The flavor is a little more pungent than peanut butter but that's because pistachios are a little more pungent than peanuts. Where I could take a spoon and just scoop peanut butter out and eat it, I really think I need crackers or biscuits for the pistachio butter. But, oh my, it is good!

I talked to my dad last night and told him about it. I also wanted help on the pronunciation of pistacchio, pistachio in Italian. Pop said, no kidding, that he didn't remember ever saying pistacchio when he was a kid and only remembers saying it in English. Since I'm not bilingual, I've never thought about there being things you'd learn about while speaking in the new language that you didn't know the word for in your original tongue. I was told that when I was learning to talk I had to learn the English word butterfly because I first saw butterflies often at the park with my grandmother. Noni called them "farfalle" and I didn't know that word was a different language than the one I was learning. Of course since I don't actually remember that one, I don't remember how it felt. I still think it would be more strange to an adult. I also think it's a bigger deal to me than Pop.

Oh, we decided because of the vowel sounds and double-c, it is pronounced
| pee-STAH-chee-o |