Favorite Things 6: Attempting to make tasty treats. And other stuff.

I can't believe Christmas is almost here. Today is Christmas Eve Eve, my favorite day of the year. I hope my Christmas planning has been sufficient. I guess we will see in 36ish hours.

Today we had a family party with Shane's side of the family. I spent yesterday making Amy's favorite chocolate cake. It turned out good despite my attempts to sabotage it (I used Pam instead of butter to grease the pan, which made it stick. I tried to make it festive by sprinkling candy cane on top and then though better of it after it was done.) It looked like this:

I also made Swedish butter cookies, which was a new recipe I tried for the first time last year. So that I don't forget how to make them the right way again next year, here is the recipe and instructions:

1 lb butter
4 cups flour
2 cups sugar
4 egg yolks
1 tsp almond extract

Cream the butter with the sugar. Add the eggs followed by the almond extract. Mix and then add the flour. Put them through a cookie press and bake in an ungreased cookie sheet at 375 degrees for 10 minutes. Don't refrigerate the dough before putting it through the press - cold dough does NOT work.

This is how I made them - I was trying to half the batch because I didn't have enough butter:

1/2 lb of butter cut into the flour (not the sugar.) Added the egg (almost added all 4 eggs before I realized I only needed  two.) I realized my mistake when I still had sugar left to add. I dumped it all into the mixer, added the sugar, and somehow put 2 teaspoons of almond extract - you know, 4 times as much as I needed. My hands still smell like almond.

It was not a good baking day. But they both tasted just fine for the party.

This morning we went to church. The program was lovely. I wish every Sunday could be as wonderful as the Christmas program. One of my favorite Christmas songs is the Christmas Canon by Trans Siberian Orchestra. The piano melody is so beautiful. Our choir had a flute and a violin in addition to the piano to play the melody but sang the words The First Noel. I love it when choirs surprise you like that with music and words that don't belong but end up complimenting each other perfectly.

Other stuff we have done lately that I wanted to blog about but didn't:

•  We went and saw the lights at Temple Square. It was rainy but fun. And, we somehow were in the right place at the exact right time in time to find my mom, who was with my sister and her kids and grandkids. It was fun to walk through Temple Square with them.

 

• Made 20 nativity scenes out of sticks for neighbor gifts.

• Ate at Desert Edge, our favorite restaurant at Trolley Square.
• Decorated my dad's grave with a bunch of family.

Merry Christmas Eve Eve to you all. I hope that the last day before Christmas that has no expectations about it whatsoever was wonderful and you did something that made you happy.

12-12-12

12 things I did on 12/12/2012:

Went to work.
Ate lunch with Heidi.
Saw my sister.
Got a warm tasty treat from Starbucks.
Went to Walmart.
Took Ben ice skating.
Helped kids with homework.
Read/listened to 17 pages of the Book of Mormon.
Got gas.
Rode public transit four separate times.
Made lunch.
Considered cleaning up some cat hurl.

It's not every day you get to do that.

What did you do for 12/12/3012?

Favorite things 5: Kid art as decorations.

I love having kids in elementary school. I love the art projects they bring home complete with glitter and handprints and the smell of Elmers glue. (These kids are lucky - we always had to use paste when I was a kid. Blech - I still remember how much I hated getting my fingers sticky with paste. Just the mention of paste and I am sitting again in my kindergarten classroom, admiring Caleb S. who ate paste, among other things. But I digress.)

One of my favorite things to do for the past three Christmases has been to decorate the tile that goes around our fireplace. I've saved the art projects Ben and Thomas have done each year and I hang them up. Seeing their efforts warms my heart.

But my favorite are the wreaths they made in preschool the year they were three (2004 for Thomas, 2008 for Ben.) Their teacher did the same craft year after year - a green wreath decorated with 5 or 6 white handprints and a poem: This will help you remember when I have grown quite tall, that I once was very little and my hands were very small. I love those hand prints. I've considered cutting the wreaths apart and making their hand prints into ornaments of some sort but I just can't bring myself to do it. They are faded and the backs are covered in tape, but I will hang them up year in and year out as long as I can. The evidence of their once smallness is bittersweet. It makes me remember when they needed me in such powerful ways. I miss being needed like that.

Thomas's

Ben's

Favorite things 4: My hometown

The other night on iTunes, they had a selection of 80's songs for only 69 cents. I played each one - Alphaville Forever Young, Eurythmics Sweet Dreams, Bette Midler Wind Beneath my Wings. As I played each one Shane and I would start to sing. And I would start to feel what that song meant to me when it played. For good or bad, I felt things that I couldn't explain or share, but just feel and remember. 



In sort of the same vein, I could never, ever live in my hometown. Like certain songs that I will always avoid when they come on the radio, living there wouldn't work. Just imagining the people who I would run into at the grocery store or see while taking the kids to the dentist makes me cringe. But I do enjoy visiting there, like I did today. I spent a very enjoyable day with my mom and Amy setting up and decorating my mom's tree. I love those ladies so much.


After we decorated, I set off on a run. The past two times I've run in my hometown I took the same path which led me towards the canyon, over to my high school, past my elementary and then home. But I recently saw a picture of my grandma's house which is also in my hometown. One of my cousins bought it years ago and raised her two sons there. I don't think I have been there in almost 20 years. So I decided today that I wanted to run the direction that would take me past grandma's house.

I was not disappointed in my route. I am always amazed at how much smaller places are now than they used to be. In less than a mile, I ran through 20 years of memories - the corner that used to have a small store on it that we called The Little Store where we would buy candy and do ceramics, the street where the friend I had in 7th grade lived, the houses where my oldest sister lived the first few years of her married life, the gas station that I drove to the very first time I drove in my life - all in .88 of a mile. Bizarre!

At a little over 2.5 miles, I spent a couple of moments at my grandma's house, looking at the giant trees and the carport that look exactly how I remember them. I pictured my grandma raising her three sons there, I pictured my dad living there, I pictured all of my cousins and sisters gathered in the living room for Christmas Day. When I left, a few blocks more took me past the house where my best friend from kindergarten lived (it's all boarded up now - so sad! It was the house that was shown in Touched By an Angel back when it was on.) I ran past the funeral home where my dad's viewing was held, and my old orthodontist's office, and the space where my family lived while our house was being built (the house has been torn down now.) All that history in a mere 4 miles.

I like not living there. Similar to how I want some songs to always remind me of him, or of her, or of that one special/terrible/life changing experience, I want those places to always remind me of my  former life rather than my current one. I don't want life to water down the feelings. I want it always and forever to be home.

Favorite things 3: Grandma's ornaments

Last year, Shane's grandma gave us some crocheted ornaments for our tree. She worked on them for months and brought them to us the week of Thanksgiving so that we could decorate our tree with them. She is never afraid to pick up her crochet hook and make something beautiful and lasting, and I love her for it.

The majority of the ornaments are snowflakes, but there are also umbrellas, fans, bells, and even an angel. This year I used them all over the house - on the garland I put on the railing, over the fireplace, hanging from bookshelves. They are everywhere and they make me so happy.

 I got this idea off of Pinterest. Kinda lopsided, though...

Aren't ornaments that have a history and a link to someone else your favorite? They are mine!

Favorite Things: 2

Today my favorite thing is Shane.

He has a birthday today. Wahoo! He doesn't love his birthday, but I love his birthday just because it's his. I like our friendship. I like how we have fun together. I like how we work through things. I like how we've both grown up a lot in the 19 years that we've known each other. Man, we were babies when we first met.

(Halloween 1994)

Happy birthday, Shane. I love you even though you figure out your presents without even opening them.

Happy birthday, Shane.

Favorite Things....

A few years ago, my friend Melanie did a series of Christmas posts that showed her favorite things at Christmas. Because I am a copy cat at heart, and for want of some cheery Christmas posts of my own, I am following Melanie's lead. This year for Christmas I want to post something every day that I love, something that is one of my favorite things.

And: I'm going to try and keep it simple. A picture, a few words (or many, depending on my mood), and boom! Done. (Because you know how good I am at keeping things simple, right?)

This is my first favorite thing:

It doesn't look like much, and honestly, it's tiny and easily overlooked. I bought it for our very first Christmas. That year, we borrowed a 3 foot fake tree from my sister and I covered it in 500 Christmas lights. It was the year I bought the garland that used to go on my railing at my old house and now goes on the mantle in my new house. We had about 20 ornaments (mostly bought from Harmon's while grocery shopping.) I loved our decorations and was proud of our efforts.

But, I was troubled that nothing represented the true meaning of Christmas. One of my favorite memories of Christmas was getting out my mom's porcelain nativity every year - her baby Jesus was not attached to his manger, and I always loved holding the tiny baby and then fitting him into his bed. In our newly married poverty, I didn't have the means or the confidence to buy a nativity of my own. So, one day I was in the Deseret Book in the ZCMI mall and I found this little one piece nativity. I was happy that I had in a tiny way invited the baby Jesus into our Christmas celebrations. i added him to our decorations and it's been with us ever since.

It's funny how the tiny things, the unplanned simple events end up meaning the most. I have another more traditional nativity with the animals and the angels and shepherds that I set up each year. And for all the memories that nativity has, I still feel partial to this first one, the one that came out of a true desire in my heart. Most people would overlook it, but it brought me joy that first Christmas.