CHRISTmas

Christmas came quickly this year.  It seemed like it was Thanksgiving one week and Christmas the next.  The tree has been up for more than a month, but I just don't have the heart to take it down yet. 

Last year at Christmas I blogged about a billboard saying Christmas is love, family, and Jesus Christ, so for the second year in a row I tried to take that to heart and do some things to simplify Christmas and focus more on those three things.

Early in the month I got busy putting together our annual Christmas letter/card and sent them off.  It seems like less and less people send cards anymore, but I love staying connected to our long distance friends and family this way.

Then I took simplifying Christmas one step further and did something different instead of neighbor gifts and extended family gifts.  Each year it has gotten more crazy as the neighborhood keeps growing and each year I wonder why we do neighbors gifts when there are so many better things we could be putting all that effort into. 

So this year instead running gifts around the neighborhood, we decided to have a neighborhood open house hot cocoa party.  So on one cold snowy day I delivered invitations to all of the 39 houses in our neighborhood inviting them all to our home the next Saturday night.

Delivering invitations in and of itself was a good thing as it gave me the opportunity to visit for a few minutes with lots of our neighbors and I was also able to introduce myself to a family that had moved into our neighborhood awhile ago that I hadn't met.

We felt like our open house was a success.  About half of our neighbors dropped by, had some cocoa, and visited with each other for an hour or so.  We even had a few neighbors we rarely see  and  a couple of the widows who don't get out much come.  Everyone seemed to have a good time and several people commented that we should do things like this more often.  So who knows, maybe we'll do it again next year. 


Another thing we did this year wasn't planned for, but just kind of evolved.   I had seen on the Daily Closer to Christ blog an idea to do 24 days of giving during the month of December.  The idea was to do something for someone else each day leading up to Christmas.

A couple of years before I had purchased this cute mitten advent garland for no specific reason, but when I saw this idea knew it was perfect.  So all month long we did little anonymous acts of service for others and then clipped what we had done to the back of each mitten.  It was a lot of fun...although it was a bit of a bummer when we paid for the person behind us in the drive up window and they had only ordered  fries and a diet coke.
 

We also cut way back on the presents we bought for each other and our children.  Each person only got a couple of gifts.  Shopping was kind of a non event for us, but we did a lot of other things together as a family.

All in all December was a lot less stressful and a ton of fun  I'm hoping we don't remember this as a Christmas of few presents, but as a Christmas of many more "gifts".

Tradition

I have noticed that after awhile most everyone who keeps a blog slows down on their blogging, so it's no surprise to me that I haven't gotten around to putting something on here for quite some time.  When that realization hits, or when someone who actually reads your blog comments wondering why you haven't posted, it's time for one of those catch up posts.  So here goes...

I have said before that Thanksgiving is my very favorite holiday.  It's my mom's fault because when we were growing up she always made it so special.  That is when relatives, who we hardly ever saw, would venture to Utah.  Mom loved to cook and this was her chance to do it all.  Our menu was the same every single year-turkey, stuffing, yams with marshmallows on top, potatoes and gravy, homemade rolls, cranberry sauce, Jello salad, stuffed celery, olives, and pumpkin pie with real whipped cream.  The table was always fancy with our china, and we dressed up for dinner.  Over the years we have tweaked things just a little, but for the most part have pretty much stuck to her menu.  But I am a little embarrassed to say our rolls have not always been homemade and I am guilty of using the Marie Callender pie crust, but other than that we've pretty much done it right.

After last Thanksgiving, when we totally broke tradition, I decided that this year we were going to do Thanksgiving the way you are supposed to.  No Rhodes rolls or grocery store pie crusts at our house.  I knew I could do this because Heather would be here to help and it's a lot of fun spending time with her in the kitchen. We made everything from scratch, even the cranberry sauce, which I'd never done before.

Can I just say traditional pumpkin pie has never been my favorite because the moist texture kind of freaks me out.  So over the years I have made chiffon pumpkin pie, pumpkin delight, or some other pumpkin concoction instead, but since I wanted to do Thanksgiving right knew this year it had to be a real homemade pumpkin pie. To build up our confidence for all this Heather and I went to a pie making demo at Sur La Table the Saturday before.  They taught us some tricks for making a perfect pie crust and a brilliant idea for making pumpkin pie on a quarter sheet pan.  Their recipe and cooking it on a quarter sheet made the texture so much better and the pieces able to be cut in smaller pieces, so we decided we'd give that a try. 

The one tradition we have incorporated that mom was never a part of is having pie the night before Thanksgiving.  We have done this the past few years and I think is the greatest idea ever.  Like most families you need many different pies besides pumpkin on the Thanksgiving menu, and the crunchy caramel apple pie I make is the favorite at our house.  So the night before Thanksgiving we gorged ourselves on apple pie and ice cream and saved the pumpkin for Thanksgiving when everyone is too full for pie, but eats it out of obligation. 

All in all is was a wonderful holiday.  Of course the best part was having our little family together.

I plan to blog soon about some other things we've been up to.