The lighter side of life – staying in touch with friends and family by celebrating the ordinary.
Food for Christmas
I’ve been baking.
My cookies aren’t very fancy, but I made up a bunch of cookie dough and left it in the refrigerator. Now we can quickly throw together a fresh pan of them every few days. We’ve been putting random things on them to “decorate” them, it’s sort of funny. Leftover halloween candy corn – why not? That one in the far right lower corner has pecan butter on it. Now that was good!
I’ll tell you who knows how to make fancy cookies is Tracey. These match her wine-themed Christmas tree.
Tracey’s cookies are quite a step up from mine, lol.
Tracey’s girls made these reindeer, aren’t they great?
John saw that photo on my computer and wanted to know where to get one. I guess he was hoping I had them hidden away somewhere. He was about ready to ransack our kitchen looking for them! Unfortunately, Tracey and her family live in California, so all we had were the tantalizing photos. They now have a standing invitation to visit Tucson at Christmastime!
I also ordered biscochitos from New Mexico for John. I wrapped them up and marked the package, “do not shake” because John is such a kid and biscochitos are crumbly 🙂
Since he was so good about refraining from shaking the biscochitos, I had to mark a package, “This one you can shake” And then I realized I better add “(within reason)”. Because, you know!
Lotsa chocolate. John is totally addicted to chocolate.
We had a chile-and-sugar theme going (also ordered from New Mexico).
John got me a really cool humming bird feeder that suctions to the window (on the outside; John just stuck it up on the inside to demonstrate). I made him take it right down from there; I didn’t want any birds getting confused and running into the window trying to get to it!
Later we put it up on the outside of my office window, and it totally works. The hummingbirds come right up to the window to use the feeder! My desk is pushed up against the window so the hummingbirds and I are eyeball-to-eyeball, with just a thin sheet of glass between us. When I get a chance I’ll post a photo of them.
He also gave me something that initially I thought was one of those collapsing laundry hampers. I tried to undo it and it whapped me right in the face! Which John caught on film, which is the only reason I’m bothering writing about a boring laundry basket.
Except it wasn’t a laundry basket at all. It turned out to be a 3-tier hanging swimsuit dryer! Very handy.
I’m not going to list out all the gifts – this started as a food post – but while I’m on a roll, here’s a very creative handmade gift from my sister-in-law, Adrienne:
Back to the topic of food – for Christmas dinner, we ordered several different kinds of empanadas from a restaurant that does Latin-Indian fusion. Yeah, like Honduras and India. Sounds like a strange combination, but the food is very good.
Although we were a bit bummed that they got their labels mixed up and our feta and spinach empanada was actually ham and cheese!
We deliberately did NOT order ham and cheese because John and I are not ham fans. Doesn’t feta sound ever-so-much better? We’ll just have to order feta empanadas again and hope it’s right this time!
We also got a Honduran tamale wrapped in banana leaves. Isn’t that the biggest dang tamale you’ve ever seen?
Both my kids cooked lamb for Christmas (which is a family tradition from the Greek side). I missed seeing them for Christmas, but we did a video call. We’ve actually been doing video calls at Christmas for about 10 years now, ever since Laura spent 5 years in Japan. So it was nothing new for us. It seems like most years one or the other of the kids joins us by video. The main difference this year was Monica (John’s mom) wasn’t able to be with us. She’s visited us at Christmas for many of the years past.
I hope everyone had a good Christmas or whatever you are celebrating, and I’m wishing you all a very Happy New Years!
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