It's Beginning to Smell a lot Like Christmas

Last week we did what we could to get things looking like Christmas so this week we will start making sure it smells (and tastes) like Christmas.

Friday we had our annual manager holiday luncheon at work, which was very nice. It is always fun to sit around eating with old friends, and I have many friends that I work with that have been there for me for many years, and I count that amongst my biggest blessings. It is really a great thing when you have to be away from home so many hours a day to have a place to go that not only pays the bills, but feels like a second family. We had a lovely lunch at Trio Café in Cottonwood, and then got to have the rest of the afternoon off. Jake and I went and did some grocery shopping so I was ready for the first “Christmas baking weekend extravaganza”, and when we got home Rob said that Circe had called and invited us to see a program by the girls and for dinner. We were a little late, but really enjoyed the program that Golda, Lexie, and Ruby had put together. They did a very good job with their choreography, and it was a lot of fun to watch them, they are amazingly talented, beautiful and wonderful girls, and we love them very much. I can't believe how big my first three little neices are getting, it seems like only yesterday that they were little babies and I was coming up with a little Christmas poem for them, and now they are doing the writing of the Christmas poems, dances and playes themselves. Jennie had made some great soup (Rob said it was the best Taco soup he had ever had), and we all had a good time supporting the local arts.

Saturday, I got up bright and early to get the baking started, but not as early as Rob, who had left for Home Depot at 7:00 a.m.. We have had a lot of leakage in our crawl space since we moved into our house and Rob has worked really hard the last year to fix the problems. It is a lot better than it was, but there is still one section of the house that is leaking and has all kinds of puddles, esp. when we’ve had a lot of rain and snow like we did the last couple of weeks. Since we had some extra money that we had been saving for a freezer, we decided that the best thing to do was just put another sump pump down there, so Rob had headed to Home Depot to pick up the parts for his project in the crawl space. Jakey and I watched a few minutes of T.V. to wake up, and then started the Christmas baking. We made peanut butter/chocolate, rocky road, and cherry chocolate pistachio fudge while Rob came home and started his project in the crawl space. The cherry chocolate pistachio I just made up the recipe myself, and it actually turned out really good, the red from the cherry with the green pistachios makes it look really Christmasy, and it tastes great. I hope I can find some more cherry flavored chips (I found some on clearance in August I've seen saving to try cherry chocolate fudge) so we can make this a tradition.

We have been watching the old classic show “A Christmas Story” with Jake, and those that have seen it will remember the scene where Ralphie says the “queen mother of all swear words” but in the movie it’s dubbed with “Oh Fudge”. Jake wanted to know what he said and to avoid telling him the actual word that no 4 year old should know I just told him, “he said fudge, it’s a very bad word”. So now we have to call that chocolate candy concoction one makes at Christmas something different at our house to avoid scandalizing the 4 year old.

After making the fudge, I then made a recipe from a friend that they lovingly call “Christmas Crack”, because it’s um kind of addictive. It’s basically English Toffee but you pour the butter/brown sugar toffee mixture on top of a layer of saltine crackers. The toffee soaks into the crackers, but the crackers stay really crunchy and the mixture of the saltiness from the crackers, and the sweet from the toffee taste really good together, plus you put a layer of chocolate on top. It sounds weird but tastes wonderful.

After finishing up all of that I realized that I probably needed to get something on for dinner, as apparently even at Christmas you can’t serve your husband a slab of fudge for dinner after he's been working in the crawl space all day. Since it was a snowy day, I made a huge pot of vegetable barley soup with sour cream lemon dumplings in it. Turned our really good, we try to do at least one vegetarian meal a week which should probably be for the health benefits, but in our case it just because it’s a really great way to cut down on the grocery bill each month. With a pot of soup on the stove, and the smells of Christmas baking filling the air, it really was smelling a lot like Christmas at our house.

Jake was licking his 4th spoon of the day from helping mommy make Christmas treats and he said to me “mom, how come I got the best mom who makes the very best treats in the whole world?”. I told him it was the same reason I got the best boy in the world that answered all my prayers, it was definitely a good mommy moment. Four year olds can be interesting little people as they struggle with the desire to do and see everything long before that have the ability, which in our house leads to a few interesting battles (the "great eating battle", the "great you can't wear the same shirt everyday" battle, and the newly popular "yes you have to wear a coat to play in the snow" battle), but that comment alone made all the work of the day worth it and reminded me why four year olds are also such wonderful little people. I wish I could capture some of that love, and innocence, to keep someplace safe to give back to him someday when he needs it most. I guess safe in mommy’s heart is just going to have to be enough.

Jake's friends Shyanna and Tanner came over after the fudge was done with shovels to "help shovel the walks" (last year Jake and Shyanna were suppose to be playing in our yard, and ran in the house with $1 each, apparently they decided that with all the snow they could start a sidewalk shoveling business, the next door neighbor kindly gave them each $1, and they did a pretty good job for a 3 and 5 year old, but we told them they maybe they should hold off on the snow shoveling business). They actually did a pretty good job, and they came after they were done for hot chocolate, and a plate of cookies.

Rob ended up spending about 7 hours down in the crawl space putting in the new sump pump, and emerged literally covered in mud. While we briefly considered just leaving him down there and tossing him food a few times a day, we finally decided it would be best to let the mud man come back to live above ground, I did briefly considering singing him a rousing rendition of "Mole People", but he didn't look like he would be amused. He’s actually pretty cute covered in mud although he washes up really well. We spent the evening watching various Christmas shows, and reading our Christmas stories (we missed Friday night), of the Elves and the Shoemaker, and an excerpt from A Christmas Carol.

Sunday Jake and I woke up bright and early and daddy slept in tired from all the hard work in the crawl space yesterday. We turned on some Christmas music (mommy bought herself Josh Groban’s Christmas CD last week), and Jake played with his “early delivery toy” that the mailman delivered from Santa on Saturday (apparently Santa was absent minded this year, and forgot to specify “weekday morning delivery only” on a special package from the North Pole that got delivered to an excited Jake Saturday morning from FedEx., I suppose things were much simpler for Santa before he did some of his shopping on-line, and next year Santa will have on-line packages delivered to Grandma’s house). The transformer “Octopus Prime” voice changer, with truck/gun transformer (apparently according to the 4 year old the verb is “trans” as in “I need to trans this gun into a truck again”) was a big hit, and as Jake said “well now Santa won’t have to carry as much because he will only need to bring me a few things for Christmas”. What a big heart to help old St. Nick out that way.

We did a bit more Christmas baking before church getting 11 dozen ginger snaps and a batch of penuche made, and then went to church. My Sunday school class was happy to share in some of the Christmas treats, in fact one of the boy s asked if he could just move in with me. They are great young men (we only have 2 young women in the 15-18 year old range in our ward, which is what I teach, and they don't come to Sunday School as often as the boys). After church daddy and Jakey had a little nap while mommy did some reading.

So got quite a bit of Christmas baking done this weekend, and really all that is left is a batch of divinity, and the sugar cookies, although I found a recipe for pumpkin fudge I’m dying to try. As of tomorrow there are only 2 more weeks until Christmas and I would like to have all the baking done by next weekend, so we can just enjoy the weekend before Christmas.

Last night while Jake was snuggled up on my lap before bed, he noticed that the Santa in our living room (the one from Grandma Hill) had on black gloves, but he saw a Santa last year at the Ward Party with white gloves. I told him the white gloves where indoor gloves, but they weren’t very warm for riding outside in the sleigh, so he had to put his black outdoor gloves on when he was outside. He thought about that for a minute and started to giggle, and said “I didn’t even know that about gloves”. I told him the he was only four and that he didn’t really know anything at all. We went back and forth with “I do know things” and “no four year olds don’t know anything”, while I tickled him, and finally he looked at me and said “well I do know one thing mom”. “What’s that”, I asked him, and he replied “well I know that you love me.”

Touché my little man, touché.