Tag: Christmas

With Christmas on Monday this year it, again, felt like a sprint to the finish. The girls had Friday off from school, but I was still working. So Saturday and Sunday were filled trying to get everything ready.

I used the weekend to bake! Peanut-butter blossoms, sugar cookies (the girls cut and decorated them), chocolate-cream pie, and crème brulée for desserts. Rolls for Christmas dinner, and baguettes to dip in cheese fondue for Christmas-Eve dinner. It took all day both days, but I got it all done.

For dinner on Christmas Eve we had our now-traditional cheese fondue with fresh baguettes, vegetables, apples, and whatever else we decide to dip. Corinne and Heather read a couple of stories, I played Christmas songs on my trombone (fairly poorly, but with all the baking I hadn’t had time to practice that weekend or warm up), and Jess read a story.

This year, in an effort to help the girls develop the ability to consider the interests of others, we had gone to Barnes and Noble and had them select books for each other as gifts. And then Jess and I switched off with them to select gifts for each of us. So after our songs and stories we all opened our books from the girls, drank hot chocolate, ate cookies, and read a little from our new books while listening to Christmas music. With the fake fire glowing in the fireplace, just needed some snow falling outside the window to make it a perfectly pleasant evening.

The girls set out eggnog, cookies, and carrots for Santa and his reindeer and then they were off to bed.

In the morning we were up at dawn (which is the girls’ usual time) to see what transformation had taken place in the house overnight.

Christmas was on a Sunday and school / work ran through the Thursday before. So we kind of ran into the day. School and work, school and work, then Friday, Saturday–boom–Christmas.

I spent almost the entirety of lead up baking. On the 23rd I made a bûche de Noël using the same recipe as my birthday cake (chocolate cake, vanilla instant-mousse filling, and chocolate buttercream frosting). It’s not the traditional French recipe in any form, but it tastes better. I wasn’t sure if the cake recipe would take to being rolled, but it worked well enough. I used a half recipe and baked it in a parchment-paper lined baking sheet. I messed up right at the end of preparing the cake and added a full amount of boiling water, but I also messed up and cooked it for the usual length of time. Thankfully those two mistakes seemed to cancel each other out and it came out fine.

On Christmas Eve I spent the day baking fresh baguettes to eat with fondue, and rolls for dinner the next day. I also worked with the girls to make sugar cookies using dough I had prepared the day before. Jess baked a chocolate fudge pie.

The evening rolled in and we ate our now-traditional cheese fondue with a variety of dippings: fresh baguette (so good), vegetables, apples, & crackers. The recipe Jess came up with this year was, by far, the best yet and will likely become the go-to recipe in the future.

Then we each read a story in the living room in front of the faux-fire. I read The Polar Express, Corinne read a booklet Heather wrote last year, titled Christmas Is, about what kinds of things makes Christmas feel special to her (which includes: picking out a special tree, decorating the house, the Christmas chain countdown, driving around town to look at lights, and reading a Christmas Eve story [among others]), Heather read Winter Candle, and Jess read The Night Before Christmas. The cats joined us for the stories and Phoenix even let me get a picture.

The girls each opened presents from each other (novelty socks and slippers!) before leaving out egg nog and cookies and heading to bed. And eventually the house was calm and quiet and the Christmas Magic happened.

Christmas morning started in the dark with Heather waking us up to say she didn’t feel well and had a headache. Then waking us up again a bit later to reiterate not feeling well and then she threw up. So it was a rough start. By that point everyone was up and moving and she felt much better after throwing up. We’d chalk it up to over excitement, but she also had a fever, which seem harder to fit into that narrative.

Anyway, she was feeling better so we got the show on the road at about 6:45am.

We made another set of gingerbread houses this year. Jess has been sick all week and made a noble attempt, but ultimately didn’t have the energy to fight through. So her house is the dilapidated shack in the back.

Pictures from getting ready for Christmas this year. We went and got a tree on the 11th. We like grand firs, but they tend to not last as long, so they’re not stocked until a little later in the month. We went to Home Depot to see what they had, but first we had to wait for someone to come out and open the tree pen. While waiting we did see that they had a sign for grand firs, so there was hope.

An employee came out and let us in and they had one bin of grand firs, about 10 trees. So we found the tallest one and called it good. And then the employee gave it to us for free, just because. He said he’d been giving out the first tree each day for free and we were first today. Hard to argue with free tree!

So we brought it home and Corinne and Heather performed the ceremonial “Freeing of the Tree.”

I got the lights on and the next day Jess put on ribbon and on the evening of the twelfth we put on the ornaments. London was becoming greatly concerned about all of this. Some time ago Jess bought these little bird decorations at Target. Corinne desperately wanted to use the branches I trimmed off the bottom of the tree for something so we made “nests” for the birds and distributed them throughout the house.

And, finally, the outside decorations. I put the arch in the yard and ran some fishing line from the tree to the house to stabilize it. Our whole street is pretty well decorated, which is fun. The wineries in town run a holiday lights trolley tour which comes down our street 3 or 4 times a night. So we’re officially a destination.