Christmas Eve

My favorite part of this past week/holiday season was Christmas Eve.

Christmas Eve included a large homemade breakfast, walk through the woods, cooking with my mom and sisters, and dinner and movie (the Christmas Story of course) at Granny’s house.

My father promised us a long walk, - and those of you who know him are probably thinking: why would we want to go on a twelve hour hike on Christmas Eve? - but really it was under an hour and quite pleasant. R got to see the trails on the side of the house that lead to the pasture next door - an area where I spent a lot of time as a kid, wandering and picking blackberries. I told him about going under the barbed wire fence to get to the patch of blackberries and he asked, why would you go under and not over the fence? I told him, because I used to be a lot smaller. I especially liked this walk because this part of the trail brought back lovely memories of my cousin (who is now a Marine - I have to add this classification because I’m so proud) and eating blackberries, crackers, and honey from honeysuckles.  Yes, for some reason we thought it would be a good idea to put honey from the honeysuckle blossoms on crackers - lots of work, but delicious.

Mom, H, L, and I started cooking things for dinner at Granny’s. Our cooking plan included green bean casserole, sweet potato casserole, and ham. We actually left the house later that evening with green beans, sweet potato soufflé, ham, and chocolate chip scones. I should point out the only item in our plan that went according to plan was the ham which was pre-made and we just heated. I actually had a great time “cooking” with my mom and sisters because we laughed more than we cooked. We didn’t have sour cream, we had enough sweet potatoes for half the recipe but no one told H we were halving the recipe so she made the full version of all the other ingredients, and Mom ate the mini m&m’s that were supposed to go into the impromptu cookies L and I were making due to a sugar/flour mixture that H had added melted butter to instead of cutting in the butter. Somehow, we ended up with some edible items (after baking the sweet potato casserole three times longer than normal) and even looked decent for festivities at Granny’s.

Thanks to my cousin’s two adorable children and H bringing the Apples to Apples game, we had a rather rowdy Christmas Eve at Granny’s house. It did get a bit out of hand when the usually intelligent and sweet three and a half year old starting yelling row tide over and over again - but we still love him. Also, our baby boy got Christmas presents! This was a wonderful surprise even though I had specifically requested selfish gifts since R and I won’t matter next year.