Catching up a bit

Just a quick little post concerning our Christmas.  It was pretty low-key for the most part.  Actually, I should back up to a couple days before Christmas.  Mr. T ended up with a couple of days off due to rain and mud.  So he got busy in the kitchen.  He made cinnamon pretzels, eggnog logs, sacher torte cookies, macaroon kisses, whipped shortbread, two kinds of fudge, three kinds of pressed cookies -- and that may be all, I'm not sure.  During that time, our kitchen was truly a festive mess, but it was a blessing to have so much help with the baking!

Eggnog Log photo from Taste of Home

For Christmas Eve, we were joined by my dad, our son, and two of our granddaughters.  We had our usual Christmas Eve Soup and I served it with these fabulous Iron Skillet Biscuits from Mountain Top Spice.  These biscuits have made a regular appearance in my kitchen since I found the recipe.  They taste similar to Cracker Barrel biscuits, only better!  Dessert was ice cream and a cookie and fudge tray. In between supper and dessert, we opened gifts and cards with the girls.

For Christmas dinner, it was the same crowd, minus the girls.  We had turkey breast, mashed potatoes, buttercup squash, and homemade cranberry orange sauce.  Same dessert.

Partial view of the Christmas table just prior to dinner

After dinner, we Skyped with our Nevada family.  Didn't get pictures of that.  One neat thing that we did during that Skype visit was to show one another our Christmas trees and other decor,

The arrangement I had for our creche this year.  The sign to the right says "thankful".

 and also the scenery outside our windows.  (They had snow, we had mild, sunny, weather with green grass!)  Skype is such a miracle, isn't it?  We had a great connection and it really seemed as if they were in the same room with us.  A fun thing for my 92-year-old dad.

And then after that, we went over to our local daughter's home and opened gifts,  played games and ate snacks with their family.  Took a cookie and fudge tray there too.

The day after Christmas, we went out for breakfast and then did a bit of after-Christmas shopping.  I'll post separately about that if I can remember to get some pictures of what we bought before it all gets put away.  So that was our celebrating.  Low-key, but enjoyable and meaningful, with lots of family time.  Hope yours was the same!