Christmas Goodies

Not much has been accomplished today. Oh, it's Friday, so I did clean up the house this morning. But that's more of a chore than an accomplishment. I stuck my nose outside just long enough to get the mail out of the box. Otherwise, I've just tried to keep warm.

We got our first Christmas card of the season today. I need to finish up my notes and get ours in the mail. Normally they would have already been out. I don't feel as much of a push to get them finished this year. Such is the life of being retired!! Hubby's little sis moved to a different home the end of October. The card we got today was from them – they tried very hard to get their cards out ahead of everyone else this season so they could be a combination holiday card and new address card. Smart girl!

I enjoy getting Christmas cards, but it seems like people don't send them out as much. I think our technology age has a lot to do with that. And postage just keeps going up and up and up. We only send about 18 cards anymore, just to our closer family members. And we won't get that many in return. But that's okay, I keep everyone on our list from year to year.

I miss the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season that was so much a part of my life when the kids were growing up. We were over the top sometimes with our Christmas decorations, but we didn't care. We always hung up stockings, even one for the family dog. There were programs and gatherings for school, others for church.

When the kids were small, there was all the time of buying and stashing gifts, figuring a time to get them wrapped, and hoping everyone would be happy. I remember a year or two they rode in my car for a few weeks, not realizing their gifts were stashed in the trunk. Another couple of years, they went in the attic. The attic had a pull-down ladder, but none of the kids was tall enough or strong enough to pull it down.

I always enjoyed the holiday cooking and baking. I always made chocolate fudge and peanut butter fudge. The kids and I would make sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies – times to roll out dough and use the cookie cutters and get flour everywhere! Sometimes we would do chocolate-dipped pretzels or peppermint bark. Other years, if we had countless gatherings to provide food for, I would go further with peanut clusters, melt almond bark over Froot Loops and drop them on waxed paper, or do the same thing with melted milk chocolate poured over peanut butter Cap'n Crunch. We also enjoyed a candy called Tiger Bark – melted milk chocolate marbled with melted almond bark with peanut butter. Yummy! M&M cookies with Christmas M&M's were also a favorite.

Sometimes I miss doing all that fun stuff in the kitchen around the holidays. But without a houseful of kids around to eat everything up, there's not much reason to make it! I usually have plenty of that kind of stuff available when we have our family Christmas gathering, since older daughter is a teacher and gets plenty of goodies from her students. And this way, I don't have to clean the kitchen or do the dishes!