Ready for Christmas

The last little while has been filled with Christmas preparations.  Last week I spent a lot of time in the kitchen baking up all our Christmas favourites.

Starting at the top we have fruitcake. Go ahead and make the obligatory fruitcake jokes but the extended family loves this recipe and just this year my son acquired a taste for it too.  The gingerbread cookies need decorating still.  The first batch was mostly given away and now I need to sit the kids down with icing  and candies to embellish this batch.  They’re still tasty though.  In the middle are my hubby’s shortbread cookies.  I love to bake but I can’t make shortbread like he can so I’ve been waiting for the baking mood to strike him.  He finally obliged on Sunday night and these are the best ever.  Beneath the shortbread are frosted orange cookies.  Mom found this recipe in a newspaper back in the early 70’s and I cannot remember a Christmas without these.  Christmas just wouldn’t be the same!  That last little cookie, a maple log,  is a recent addition to the Holiday lineup but a popular one.  The one on this plate is the only one left.

There was also a batch of caramel corn in pretty little packages but I neglected to take a picture before they were given away.  I also didn’t get much of a chance to indulge in it.  I’ll just have to make another batch soon.  Maybe for New Year’s. 

Tree trimming was later than usual this year.   The kids asked to wait until they were out of school for Christmas vacation, so we waited until this past Friday afternoon.  I set up the tree and brought up the bins of decorations before they came home from school, hubby came home early and we spent the rest of the day and early evening decking the halls. 

 

 

 

It is becoming a challenge to fit all our ornaments on the tree.  When my husband and I were first married, we had a little 2 foot tall tree and about a dozen ornaments that were carried over from my childhood trees.  It needed work, so every year we made something new to add to the collection.  We graduated to a 6 foot tree so needed to keep adding.  Of course a when the kids came along they started contributing creations.  Soon adding new ornaments became less a necessity and more a tradition.  I’ve recently suggested that we could either stop adding or start removing a few to make way for the new but that was met with resistance, so this is what our now 7-foot tree looks like:

This is not a decorator’s dream by any stretch, but it’s exactly how we like it.  I’d say except for the lights (which are hard to see in this daylight picture) and the coloured balls, 95% of the ornaments are homemade by me or the kids, and/or have a story attached.  In fact, I think even the three oldest boxes of coloured balls have a story attached.  Part of the reason it takes hours to decorate this tree is that stories of the Christmas we made this one or that one get trotted out and that slows down the decorating process.  It’s a fun tradition though.

Here are some of my favourite ornaments.  Some are by me (one of them circa 1976), some by the kids, some by us together. 

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And here is the only bit of quilting this house has seen in the last couple of weeks.

Merry Christmas!