Ho-Ho-Ho-liday Traditions!
By April on Dec 23 Filed In Activities Add a Comment
This is the first year that I am not giving any presents and it feels strange and extremely liberating all at the same time. With all the personal changes that have occurred this particular season, I started to think about which of my family traditions I enjoy and miss since I haven’t had the time to be very involved the last couple of years. Lots of people have holiday traditions that keep them going like, caroling, fruit cake trades, white elephant parties and my favorite tradition, baking Christmas cookies with my mom.
Growing up, both of my folks worked and when it came time for the holidays, my parents seemed to enjoy doing as little as possible, which included cooking. The one exception my mom would make was for cooking Christmas cookies. We’d work in our tiny kitchen (we had an 800 sq ft house back then) making the tastiest and most simple sugar cookies for hours as there are several steps to creating these fine cookies. My favorite part of the whole deal (besides hanging out with my mom) was picking out the cookie-cutters that I wanted to use and then creating the icing. The icing was the easiest part of the recipe but seemed to me to be the most creative. You got to take the colors you were given and then mix them to create another cool color. My purple never really turned out as purple as I had hoped, but our cookies were usually pretty wild-looking!
Christmas cookies ala Stevie K. Bear
I know that Christmas cookies won’t be in the cards for us this year, so I was lucky enough to be with my friend Stevie Bear (great friend and Realtor) this past weekend while she was getting crazy in her kitchen. Iced Christmas cookies, fudge, bear cakes with caramel in the middle (amazing!), some other kind of cookie, chocolate chip cookies and my favorite sweet (that I shouldn’t be eating) rice-crispy treats! Such a plethora of sweet smells were coming from Stevie’s home that I was having a hard time concentrating on the mortgage stuff she and I were reviewing. Thankfully (or not), Stevie sent me home with a nice mixture of the goodies she had been creating. We won’t even talk about the destruction that this season has wrecked on my life-style change. We’ll be altering things back to “normal” after next week. Then it’s time for MS 150 training!
What’s your favorite holiday tradition?
