It used to be that Frances and I would take the GO train downtown and stay overnight before the Santa Claus Parade, so we could get up early enough to get a good seat. Because if you’ve never been to the Toronto parade before, be forewarned: you need to stake out a curbside seat at least 3 hours before the parade begins.
But Frances has learned that Santa Claus is not, strictly speaking, corporeal. So she was not so keen on sitting on cold concrete for three hours waiting for the parade to begin, and then another two hours wait to spend one minute waving madly to the man in the big red suit. Though I will always treasure our parade memories, I couldn’t really blame her.
Instead, we went down for a night in a fancy pants downtown hotel to celebrate her birthday a few weeks early, over a Sunday night, taking Monday off. And while I could gush (more) about the fantastic weekend we had and how much fun it is to travel with my girl, I’ll instead say that we ended up packing a bunch of handmade clothes for our weekend–both for our days and for sleeping–and it was a matter of course. They’re just comfortable basics that we wear a lot. Neither cake nor frosting–they are whole wheat bread.
Sugar-free. Staples. Delicious, toasted with butter.
No, wait. Scratch the toasting. Though whole wheat bread, if it’s nice, doesn’t have to be boring or invisible. Believe me, if you ever get the chance to have toasted walnut-and-honey bread with butter, it is delicious and you should not pass it up. A thousand times better than some frozen frosted grocery store cake.
We did have a fantastic time, of course. Frances loves clay and pottery, so we went to the Gardiner museum and they just so happened to have a kid’s xmas activity involving clay, christmas cookie cutters, texture tools and lots of slip. So that was fantastic. Then we checked out the Eaton Centre and all of the unbelievably overdone christmas lights and decorations Toronto does so well. We had our obligatory run-ins with Toronto assholes who were much, much too busy and important to allow a young girl visibly struggling to go ahead of them through various doorways, and instead pushed her aside to preserve those crucial 145 seconds of their one precious lives. This served only to remind us how glad we are not to live in TO anymore, though it is fun to visit.
Plus decadent meals. Fancy hamburgers. Room-service chicken noodle soup and french onion soup. Fantastic chocolate chip cookies made by a friend. Perfect bacon, hash browns, sausages and french toast for breakfast.
Which would be the sewing equivalent of … what? Blue jeans? Cozy sweaters? Bathrobes? A warm winter coat? A soft t-shirt? I see no skirts or dresses in that menu. Comfort food = comfort wear, no?
I’ve stretched that analogy as far as it can go, and then some, I know. It probably hit someone in the eye when it snapped, and for that I apologize. tl; dr–We went to Toronto and we wore mostly the clothes I’ve made for us and it was nice and cozy and no one asked me if I’d made those clothes because they are so utterly unremarkable, which is what makes them perfect.
Also, I need to make french onion soup very, very soon.
The blazer post is coming. I just need to upload a few more pictures. What would the food equivalent of a suit be, I wonder? Maybe a steak?
(Yep, this was a boring post. But I would love to hear about your own personal sewing/food analogies. Do you sew breakfast cereal–clothes you don’t have to think about and that don’t cost a lot of money? Or how about cheese soufflé–clothes that look incredibly impressive but are maybe not as hard as they look? Four course or fast-food? Is a steady diet of cake-and-frosting making you at all nauseous?)
Zoopolis 
Glad your getaway was so enjoyable. People’s stress level seems so palpable in Toronto. I could not deal with all of the hurrying on a daily basis anymore either.
If people want to hurry along I really don’t mind. It’s when they hurry along right into me, or Frances, particularly when they knock her over so that they can get to the revolving door first, that it really irritates me. If you’re not hurrying to your mother’s death bed, there is really no reason not to wait for the five seconds necessary for Frances to negotiate the door. kwim?
I prefer to think of garments I wear regularly as powerful, reliable draft horses pulling me forward throughout my day. Or, if I do my planning and construction well enough, interchangeable wardrobe building blocks that I can both abuse, rely upon, and ultimately forget about. I think the only food metaphor that resonates with me is the idea of basic knit garments as snacks – easily obtained, easily consumed.
Glad your trip was festive and wonderful 🙂
I like the snacks one. A FB friend of mine proposed the idea of mending as “leftovers,” and I like that one, too.
Draft horses! I’m not sure I have enough faith in the strength of my garments to go for draft horses. Maybe goats. Or ducks.
I swear, the thing that made me accept the offer to move with my job to NB was the fucking St Clair Streetcar. I was on there one day and had some hipster douche yelling at me to “move back” despite having ZERO room unless I wanted to swallow someone…that was it. Straw-broken back.
So glad you had a great time together. I love stuff like that 🙂
It was really fantastic. 99.999% awesome. 0.001% jerkface.
It’s funny. When I first moved to Hamilton I knew I loved Dundas but wasn’t sure about the rest of it. The more time has gone by the more I love Hamilton–it’s the first city I’ve ever lived in that I’ve really loved living in, and now when I visit Toronto, all I can think of is how glad I am that we moved. I miss the subway, but that’s it.