Starting Christmas Traditions

January 31, 2012 nk3304 Comments

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.

Christmas shoes! — A present from my parents

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

yum! — Frittata & mimosa... that hits the spot!

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…

How the Grinch Stole Christmas — He's a mean one... Mr. Grinch!

…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!

Christmas Eve 2011

January 30, 2012January 30, 2012 nk3302 Comments

Christmas Eve… so exciting! At home, this is the evening when we open a few gifts. Some years it was gifts from grandparents, and sometimes it was gifts for/from siblings. Andrew & I were really good and didn’t open any on Christmas Eve! Part of the reason was because we were pretty busy.

We had decided to just invite two other couples over for Christmas dinner. We weren’t up to planning a big thing like we did for Thanksgiving! So a lot of Christmas Eve was spent in the kitchen, actually! Andrew wanted to try out a recipe he had for dinner rolls (they turned out so yummy!):

And I wanted to get some baking done. I hadn’t made Christmas cut-out cookies yet (I always make some of these at Christmas), and I also wanted to make some of the mint candies for our dinner guests! Then I looked at the cheesecake recipe I was planning on…and saw that it was going to be a bit time-consuming. So that needed to get started Christmas Eve as well. Needless to say, I was up later than I had anticipated.

Once Andrew got his rolls done, he made a nice fire in the living room. I didn’t get to enjoy it much from the kitchen, but it definitely helped add to the “Christmas-y” atmosphere!

Christmas Eve — Look at all of those presents!!

Part of the reason I was up so late was because I chose to use a rather tedious way to decorate my Christmas cut-out cookies. I used Royal Icing, which is supposed to give a smooth, matte finish. The reason it’s time-consuming? First you pipe out the outlines for each area (and I was using lots of colors), and then you thin out the icing to fill those piped areas with liquid to “flood” the surface of the cookie. If you watch the video on the website I linked to above, you can watch how long it takes to do just ONE cookie! I was probably in the kitchen icing about 3 dozen cookies for 3 hours or so. We have tile floor, so my feet were pretty sore after that!

Once the cookies were done, and after I took a break to make dinner, it was back in the kitchen to make gingerbread cookies. Yes, I forgot to look at the cheesecake recipe, which calls for homemade gingerbread cookies to make the crust. *Sigh* So I only ended up making the gingerbread cookies on Christmas Eve. I figured I’d finish it up the next morning after opening presents!

Daily living

O Christmas Tree

January 27, 2012 nk3302 Comments

Things were obviously a little different for us this Christmas. We wouldn’t be driving up to my parents’ house. We wouldn’t be flying to Reno to see Andrew’s parents (or having them fly to Wisconsin). This is the first Christmas I have ever NOT been with family. Last year was probably Andrew’s first year away from family, since he was at basic training. I was really worried that I was going to be really depressed around the holidays. But I was a woman on a mission: I was not going to let distance bring me down! I was going to have a fabulous Christmas no matter what!

First thing on my list? A Christmas tree. I feel like the majority of people now have an artificial tree they put up every year. My family has always had a real tree, from what I can remember. I know there were a few early years that we just had a little fake tree, but I think that’s because we usually went to Michigan for the actual holiday.

December 1989 — There's our little artificial tree in the background

Yep, that’s me on the right. Cute, huh? 🙂

We left the artificial tree I had gotten in college back in Wisconsin to be put in storage. We wanted to start off our marriage (and our first Christmas as a married couple) with a real tree! When I asked around back in October, a lot of local people didn’t know where to get a real tree from. I was a little shocked! But after I looked around online, I found a nearby tree farm that sounded pretty good.

Elveden — People in line with their trees

The prices were higher than I was expecting, but they were also in GBP. No matter. We still searched high and low for the perfect tree! Andrew wished they weren’t pre-cut, but he did manage to find one that he liked.

Did I mention that I’m a perfectionist? Well, so is Andrew. I fear for our future children… Anyway, he was very picky about the tree we got. I was a lot more easygoing about the whole thing, so I eventually just left the decision up to him. I knew I would never hear the end of it if I picked out an asymmetrical tree! And it had to have “soft” branches. Andrew knew he was in charge of putting on the lights, and he didn’t want battle wounds from poky tree branches. We really were happy with this tree — no complaints!

My favorite part of this tree farm? They had Newfoundland dogs there to pull your tree to your car in a wagon. It was free, although they were taking donations to raise money for either Dog Trust or just a Newfie rescue group, I think. We were happy to donate! Our dog was named Lucy. She was so pretty! Her handler (I assume he is also her owner) was so nice, and he insisted on taking pictures of us with her!

We had such a great time at the Elveden tree farm! I’m sure we will go back there next year too. There is also a large store next to the tree farm that sells local meats, cheeses, wines, mead (and more!), and it has a restaurant too. It’s not cheap, but we couldn’t resist picking up some meat to grill and some mead!

Next step was decorating the tree. The least expensive lights we could find for the tree (since we needed ones with UK plugs) were strands of 100 with no connecting plugs! So poor Andrew ended up string 1200 lights on our tree with numerous power strips. Our tree looked nice from the front, but there were 12 cords streaming out from the back, haha! All we could really do was laugh at that point.

I loved decorating our first tree, and I’m so happy with how it looked! It’s nearly the end of January now, and we are planning to take out the tree this weekend. I’m already excited to do it all again in 10 months! 🙂