Tis the season for year-end posts, I know, but I’m going to squeak one more FO post in before I start that (I’m giving myself the whole first week of January for look-back, look-forward stuff). Anyway. When I started knitting/sewing all my Christmas gifts, I started a little tradition for myself: when my last gift is off the needles, I cast on a pair of socks for me. It’s not a big thing, but socks are good for all the travel and casual socializing of the holidays, and new socks are sort of a holiday classic.

This year, though, I decided to do something a little different. For starters, L and I decided to spend Christmas together, so I went home with him for a week. I know the rhythms of my family’s holiday traditions inside out, but I wasn’t sure how much knitting time I’d have with his family, and I wanted to be open to all the differences instead of lamenting a lack of time with my needles. I also, if you remember, wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to finish L’s gloves before Christmas, so I wasn’t really sure I’d even have time to knit Christmas socks for myself.

How lucky then, that I had a lovely pair of socks already on the needles! I started my Blackberry socks way back in September, but as often happens with this kind of sock (fun, variegated yarn at a tight gauge) they were my in-between knitting, and quickly got put aside entirely in favour of holiday knitting. I was part-way into through the leg of the second sock, and they were in a holiday-ish colour, so they were a perfect alternative to an entirely fresh pair.

I finished L’s gloves a few days before Christmas, so I picked up these socks and got to work. Somehow, between cooking and eating and socializing I managed to sneak in a few stitches, and a couple of movies later they were finished! I cast off on Christmas Day (thank goodness I’d brought some back-up yarn for my short flight home!) and they are lovely, if I do say so myself.

I’ve been paying attention to my habits lately and it seems that, when I have a full drawer of clean socks, these kinds of plain, tightly knit ones are the first to get warn. They’re the ones I reach for again and again, though they’re also the ones I take longest to knit: if they aren’t striped, I don’t seem to ever be in a hurry to finish plain stockinette socks — my last three pairs all took more than three months from cast-on to cast-off, whereas plain striped socks seems to knit themselves. The solution, I think, is clearly more stripes!

Since this post is turning into an end-of-December sort of analysis anyway, one last thing: Do you remember my sock goal for this year? Basically I wanted to knit about seven everyday pairs of socks, preferably from my stash. Well, I just about did it. I knit six plain pairs (out of 12 pairs total — more on those in my actual wrap-up post) and, except for one pair, they were all from stash yarn! My Blackberry socks are actually from yarn I bought over three years ago, right around the time I was acquiring a stash, so that’s pretty good I think.

I definitely have more sock (and knitting) plans for 2015, but I will give that its own post. In the meantime, do you knit for yourself over the holidays? After so long knitting for others, it feels like such a treat.