Starting Christmas Traditions

True to form, I could fall asleep the night before Christmas. I told you, I get really excited about this holiday! I was exhausted from baking Christmas Eve, but that didn’t seem to help me fall asleep any faster. Christmas seems to make me 8 years old again, every single year!

My mom always made some sort of Christmas breakfast for us. Obviously, my mom wasn’t around to do that this year, so I had picked out a yummy frittata to try. I had already torn up bread for the soft bread crumbs, and I had chopped the vegetables the night before, so this was pretty quick and easy to throw together. We opened presents while it was baking.

While I was getting the frittata out of the oven and on plates, Andrew made mimosas!

I told Andrew that this is what I wanted for one of our traditions: Christmas morning brunch with mimosas (orange juice for future kids!) and coffee and…

…watching one of my favorite Christmas movies! It was such a great Christmas morning, I really couldn’t complain about being away from home. After we relaxed together for awhile, I went to finish that gingerbread cheesecake, and Andrew did some cleaning for me.

Another tradition I hope we continue? Always having a full table for Christmas dinner. Being in a different country, we weren’t going to have our family with us for the holiday. But neither were a lot of our friends here. So we had two other couples over for dinner. Andrew did most of the meal: he grilled prime rib and roasted vegetables for a side dish. So I decided I was making an appetizer:

These are called Caprese Skewers, and I found the recipe on Pinterest. Appetizers are often kind of tedious to make, but these came together fairly quickly! I thought they were absolutely delicious, and we only had a few left over. Plus they’re in Christmas colors — what more could you want? 🙂

Andrew’s dinner was fantastic! Everything tasted wonderful, and I’m pretty sure no one left hungry!

If you would like the recipe for the grilled ratatouille that we had, let me know, but here is a very similar one from Bobby Flay. The only big difference in ours was some sherry vinegar. See all of those rolls in the picture? Yeah, they ALL got eaten! Who knew 6 people could eat so much bread?! 🙂

After dinner, I almost forgot about my most anticipated tradition: the pickle ornament! I don’t remember when I heard about the custom of finding the pickle ornament on the tree, but I wanted a pickle ornament since then! Andrew’s mom sent us one this year, and I was thrilled to be able to start the tradition! Since we don’t have kids yet, I made our unsuspecting dinner guests play the game.

Our pickle ornament-finders got a special gift: a gingerbread cookie making set. I’m excited to keep that tradition going as well as the others we started this year!

Our guests left fairly early so they could do what we did: call home! We spent several hours on the phone calling our parents and grandparents. A perfect Christmas? No, but it was a great Christmas, and it was our first Christmas as a married couple!