Of all of the stories that Charles Dickens wrote, the one that resonates most with me is A Christmas Carol. In it, Dickens follows the life of a man named Ebenezer Scrooge who is not a good person. He has made his fortune by squeezing ever bit that he can from the people who work for him, and then saved the money he has made by being very, very stingy. Then, one Christmas Eve, he is visited by three ghosts, the ghost of Christmas past, the ghost of Christmas present, and the ghost of Christmas future. In the story, it is the ghost of Christmas future that gets Scrooge’s attention, but yesterday, it was the crochet ghost of Christmas past that got mine.

My youngest son has come to visit for the holiday, and shortly after he arrived he asked me if I remembered the sudoku afghan I had made for him many years ago.

It was one of those projects that I didn’t get done in time for Christmas of 2012, but I did get it done by January 1 of 2013:

Well, done-ish.

The afghan proper was completed, but I had only made some of the solving pieces, and it seemed that the ones I had made had been permanently put away, somewhere I could no longer recall.

Luckily for me, when I was sorting through the myriad things that need sorting through, I came across this yellow square–a crochet ghost of Christmas past:

Another lucky turn for me. I had recently come across some crochet granny squares that I had decided to frog so I could reclaim the yarn, and one of the colors I had unraveled was the exact shade of purple that I needed. Using a 6.0 mm hook, the yellow square I had found as a guide, and the reclaimed light orchid yarn, I had nine solving squares crocheted in no time:

With enough light orchid squares to solve at least one sudoku puzzle, I then grabbed a partial skein of spring green and got to work:

Pleased with my progress, I got this photo of the eighteen squares with thirty-six ends to weave in:

The past year-and-a-half of moving has been interesting to say the least, and now that all of my crochet “things” are in one place, all that is left to do is bring some order to them–one stitch at a time.