Christmas(ish) Roundup
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Hello friends! How were your Christmas breaks? Presentabulous? Foodlicious? Familytastic? I hope so - ours has been, although not in the way we first thought.
December has gone quickly here at the PM house, so much so that I only realized yesterday that since November has only 30 days, the date on my watch has been one day behind all month - and I didn't even notice.
Our holiday season always gets started with The Husband's birthday. As usual, the day begins with cake for breakfast. Only this year it was a bit of a fail:
The only candles in the house were the "3" and the "5" that were forgotten for my cake last year, so I had to go with those. Eh, he's old now. He doesn't even remember how old he is.
Then, the super snowstorm you saw in the last post prevented me from going shopping, so I had to purchase the ingredients for the cake at the grocery co-op. The co-op is pretty much my favourite place in the whole world, but given its granola-ish birkenstock hipster tendencies, boxed angel food cake mix is not something it carries. So I made that baby from scrrrrratch.
(Yes, 12 egg whites. Yes, at 10 pm the night before. Yes, I am a martyr to the birthday breakfast.)
The cake? Good. The icing? Less good. Apparently you cannot make pudding icing with cooked pudding. And hipsters don't do instant. Except for the tofu kind.
Next up in the holiday excitement was the church Christmas pageant - always awesome. This year, our household contributed two out of three wisemen:
What made our Christmas strange this year was the absence of the Great White North. We're stuck Stateside for immigration reasons (good reasons, mind you) so we're unable to go to the Motherland for awhile. So Christmas had to come to us. First, in the form of a gathering in the Grand Forks Canadinns (which is about as close to Canada as we'll get this year).
My momma put on her event planner cap and we had our traditional Chinese food Christmas dinner:
(She's actually quite happy about her consomme, I promise.)
The stockings were perched on the back of the hotelroom couch with care:
And my momma even managed to put together the standard Buche de Noel for dessert:
Christmas Day found us, shockingly, alone with just the four of us - the first time that has ever happened. Since it was a one-off, we made sure to keep it non-traditional. The Boy and I made Ginger-Dead Men:
And then we joined a surprisingly large number of people at the movie theatre for The Hobbit. In 3D (which explains the weird glasses).
(Someone also declared Christmas dinner hair-and-makeup-optional.)
Grandma and Grandpa brought hugs and kisses as well as the loot Santa dropped off for us at their place:
(The livingroom might still look like this. No judgment please. It's cleaner than the kitchen.)
And to top off all the cozy merrymaking, we had our first fire ever in our little house on the hill:
(According to our chimney sweep guy, this sucker's known as an "Iron Maiden" and he hasn't seen one in a looooong time. He figures it was added to the house in the twenties sometime. Just think of the generations of children that have burned their hands on this entirely-unsafe beauty.)
And now we're just hanging out and whiling away the rest of 2012. I've read three books in 24 hours, The Girl is lounging in pajamas, The Boy is in his skivvies (not an unusual state of affairs, actually), and The Husband is whimpering with anxiety about the impending Vikings game.
Feel free to come and join us if you don't mind picking your way through the boxes and wrapping paper and dirty dishes. You can wear your jammies and there's leftover cheesecake for all!
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