Twas the week before Christmas -

and all through the house, Rachael was going CRAZY!

Ok, with the best of intentions, I decided to do handmade Christmas this year. I started working on presents in March, thinking that I would have everything wrapped up (literally) by early October, giving me all of the Thanksgiving and Christmas season to enjoy my family and friends.

Ha.

Double Ha.

Here it is, 5 days before Christmas and I still have three gifts I have to make. I'm not saying I don't feel accomplished for what I've gotten done in the last couple of months, but I am embarassed of the gifts I DID make and I just don't think I'll waste my energy next year, no matter how badly I want to express my creative side.

After I know people have received their gifts, I will post some photos.

We had "Christmas" with my parents this weekend; on Friday (from scratch) I made: a standing rib roast with a horseradish mustard sauce, buttermilk mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, sweet and sour green beans, cranberry sauce, roasted garlic butter spread for the french loaf, corn casserole and then for dessert a pound cake (with strawberries) and one of those creamy, fluffy chocolate pies. It was damn good, if I do say so myself.

Saturday night, my parents stayed at the house with Lilah while Ben and I celebrated our 6th anniversary of meeting at The Melting Pot. They were featuring an "Alpine" dinner, so we got that, including every alpine drink they had.

I do not drink that much anymore, and I should not have drunk one wine spritzer, a wine sampler with 3 different 2 oz. portions of wine and then half each of two dessert wines.

:-)

I will not be doing that again.

Well, at least not anytime soon.

Today Ben cooked a huge breakfast with homemade waffles and bacon, grits and scrambled eggs. SO GOOD! Then we opened presents. I gave away one of my homemade gifts to my mom: A silhouette of Lilah. I had been wanting to have her silhouette done for at least 6 weeks this summer, and we have a very talented woman in town who does them downtown some weekends. But I could never get her to return my emails, nor could we seem to find her when she was supposed to be in her studio. Finally, I got made and just decided to do it myself. I cheated, of course - I used a photo for my outline. But having to make all the little tiny cuts took some patience, and I was very proud of the end result. I don't think I could have done it again so nicely if I had to.

and then I got interrupted writing this, and now it's two days later, so to say that I've lost my train of thought is the understatement of the year. :-/