Our family won’t be spending much money on gifts for each other this year. Instead, we are trying to be purposeful about spending time together. So this weekend, my parents and my sister’s family came to spend the weekend with us. One thing we wanted to do while we were together was to eat four sticks of butter.

I kid. Kind of. Actually, we wanted to make Pioneer Woman’s cinnamon rolls because they are the most wonderful, festive, fantastically delicious tin full of fat you will ever eat. So my kitchen was filled up with flour, sugar, tag-playing-kids and Bing Crosby’s White Christmas.

There was a lot of butter and a little dancing. The recipe makes seven tins of rolls. Pioneer Woman talks about making these and delivering them to friends at the holidays. What a great idea, we thought, as we finished off the third tin. Granted, there were twelve of us. But still. That’s a lot of rolls.

I did deliver one tin to my sister-in-law and it was extremely satisfying to show up on her cold doorstep with warm, maple, coffee smelling rolls. I assume everyone has heard of these, but if you are one of the three who haven’t, here is the recipe. And we only ended up using three sticks of butter, so they’re that much closer to healthy.

**I’m linking this post with Sandy’s Home is… party.

My sister and I used to live half a block away from each other. Next month, it will be two years since they moved away. This time of year I get kind of nostalgic about it. Not to mention the fact that the Lost finale was last night so that just solidifies the season of goodbyes.

And my house is a mess. Used to, when my house was a mess and I needed a change of scenery, I would grab the kids and we would walk down the street and hang out with The Nester.

Only she wasn’t The Nester back then. But she still nested. Her home is always so cozy and inviting. And she makes a great iced coffee.

When you’re on the verge of losing your mommy mind, or your grown-up, work full-time mind,  or whatever kind of mind you might happen to have, there is something about having a place to go. Like Cheers except without the addictions.

Something that seems so important and patient-testing when I am by myself turns comical and lighthearted when I’m with my sister. Everyone should have someone like that. And everyone should also have a jar of wooden eggs with a spoon in it. Don’t you just love her?

She only lives a few hours away now, so I really can’t complain. Still, today I’ll have to settle for these photos I took at her house. It’s not as good as the real thing, but I’ll take it.

School was out for the summer and we had a hundred years of warm ahead of us to play and be and pretend. As the little sister, I typically followed her lead in things. But on those bright, Indiana summer mornings, she and I had completely different ideas of what it meant to play Barbies.

The set up was always the same: Barbie furniture on one side, dolls on the other, and piles of pink and white sparkly clothes and shoes in the middle. With sun-kissed shoulders and skinned up knees, we would sit cross-legged and eager with all of our loot spread out before us. It was time to pick.

For me, picking the dolls was the most important part. Deciding which dolls would be related, dating, or married was half the fun. Then, you got to choose their ages and names and determine which ones were gonna be nice and which ones weren’t based on really objective things like hair color and eyebrow shape. That was the serious business of Barbie playing.

But not for my sister. To her, picking was all about the furniture. She would always choose the best stuff. The pink couch, the plastic china cabinet and the bed with the lacy canopy. She wasn’t limited to the ‘real’ Barbie furniture. She would shop the house for unlikely things to use to make the Barbie houses better, like the artificial flowers from mom’s dresser that would become a gigantic potted plant in the corner. That kind of thing.

While I was busy making up pretend scenarios for our Barbies to live out, she was busy creating a beautiful, pretend house for them to live in. And she is still doing it. Only now, her furniture isn’t pink or made of plastic.

She writes about imperfect, inexpensive ways to make your home beautiful on her blog, Nesting Place. Most of you already know that. What you may not know is that she has compiled her philosophy of nesting in an e-book entitled It Doesn’t Have To Be Perfect To Be Beautiful. It’s free and full of pretty photos and practical tips to help you create an environment in your home that is beautiful to you.

So while I may have been disappointed as a kid that my sister wouldn’t play Barbies for real, I now reap the benefits of her nesting ways and simple, creative ideas. And you can, too!