Holiday Happenings

Christ is Born!  Glorify Him!

We celebrated Nativity on Sunday and it was a COLD day!  The high was about 10 that day, and I was very grateful that our car started in the morning when it was still less than 8 degrees!  My original plan for a Christmas dress failed (as usual--this seems to be an annual theme for me) but the flannel dress I ended up wearing was much warmer anyway.

On Saturday (Christmas Eve) I did a bunch of cooking to get ahead of the holiday busyness, and I also made another batch of Butternut Apple soup.  I made it a few weeks ago and loved it as part of my own food repertoire.  

My mods were to use no-chicken broth because of my allergies, and I also added a hearty splash of heavy cream, although you could use coconut milk to make it vegan for fasting seasons.  The first time I made this, I used regular apples, but the second time I used Granny Smiths, and I can say that the first variety was fine, but the Granny Smiths are really lovely--they add a wonderful bit of tartness to it.  The soup is lovely with bacon or sausage in or on it.

I took the girls to the Slavonic church down the street for Compline on Christmas Eve.  I always love how they decorate that church for Christmas--the big life-size icon of the Holy Family is a particular favorite of mine.  There is a relic in the bottom of the area that is set up to look like the church in Bethlehem, so I think it might be from the Holy Land.

The relic under the icon:

Christ is Born!  The girls were kind of wild and barely made it through Compline, but at least we got to a bit of the service that night.

After they were in bed, I put all the baby Jesus figures into my Nativity sets.

And then we drove an hour in the morning to our regular parish for the festal Liturgy.

It was a full house!

I got a flannel nightgown from my parents for Christmas and it is The Best Thing Ever.  I'm terribly cold at night and this thing is like wearing a neck-ankle blanket with long sleeves.  I still wear leggings and wool socks with a wool sweater over it, but man.  It's great.  We also put a mattress gel foam topper on our 13-year-old mattress yesterday to see if we can beg a few more years out of it (getting a king size mattress up and down three flights of stairs in a row house is No Joke and we are not in a hurry to undertake that hassle or expense any time soon).  It certainly makes our bed tall!  I'm not sure whether it makes a difference to how the mattress feels, although I do think I slept a bit better last night.  Fewer pressure points on my hips and such, so perhaps it was a good purchase.  It certainly wasn't worse, so that's something.

It's a longish story how this came about, but the kids had a half day yesterday because of an ice storm (between 2 snow days last week and a half day yesterday, I'm getting absolutely nothing done), and Boo and Birdie both wanted to learn to sew.  So I got out some felt I had and made a template and they both made little stuffed birds.  It was kind of a great project for them as it didn't require precision and the felt was very forgiving in terms of being able to back a needle out to correct stitches.  This is Boo's:

They both want to make more, but I think it will have to keep until the weekend.

We also celebrated Piglet's 10th birthday yesterday (his actual birthday was Saturday, but he was tied up with church all day and wanted to celebrate with non-fasting food this year, so we pushed off to yesterday).  He requested chili (the regular one, not the keto one I've been making all fall; everyone likes both) and cornbread, and salad.  And a chocolate fudge cake for dessert.

I had made the cake layers last week and froze them and planned to frost them yesterday sometime in the afternoon, but with having to pick the kids up mid-day and then the epic sewing project, I kind of got sidetracked, and suddenly it was 4:00 p.m. and I had frozen cake and no frosting or filling made.  Eek!  (At least the chili was done and just needed to be heated!)  I did a quick defrost by sticking the cakes in a 170 degree oven for 10 minutes (worked great! but the layers are very thin, so your mileage may vary if you try this).  I whipped the cream and added raspberry jam to the cakes and stuck them together while I made the frosting.  The frosting for this cake was a kind of tempered chocolate ganache and took way longer than expected.  (She doesn't say to temper the chocolate, but you kind of have to; the chocolate chips don't totally melt if you just add the warm butter/milk/sugar to them and let it sit.  You have to put the bowl over a pot of steaming water to get the frosting smooth.  I then put it in the fridge during the stirring/setting part to help it set faster).  The frosting was pretty soft when I put it on, so it isn't the prettiest looking cake, but it was very tasty!

Word to the wise: if you are a volume eater, and like big portions, this is not the cake for you.  It is super rich and anything more than a small slice will probably make you sick!  I do think putting whipped cream between the layers instead of additional frosting kind of cut the sweetness a bit (in a good way).  If I make this again, I might use bittersweet chocolate chips to bring the sweet level down a bit.  I'm also perplexed about the thinness of the cake layers--I made it exactly according to the recipe, but it seemed like the cake batter was written for two six inch layers, not two eight inch layers.  But a one inch layer of whipped cream and jam gave the cake some height.  :)

Ponchik is home with a cough today (she's been coughing in a kind of sickly way since Saturday) and asked to stay home from school, which is unlike her, so I think she must really need a quiet day at home.  It's a good thing she is in preschool!

I did get a tiny bit of writing done yesterday, in between an appointment and picking up the kids early, but today is my husband's namesday, and Ponchik is home, so I'm probably not going to get much done.  I'm about 75% of the way through that sweater I'm knitting, so I'll probably just focus on that today.  I'm resigned to this month not being particularly productive in terms of writing.  On the upside, I got another idea for a different story/series that I started working with one day last week and I'm excited to have something new to work on when I need some space from my original story.