In our home we have developed a few of our own Christmas traditions over the years that are important to our family. Christmas Eve is a special evening, a quiet evening spent together as a family giving us time together to enjoy the company of one another and to reflect upon the true meaning of Christmas. We take this opportunity also to have a traditional candle-lit meal. This meal also serves as some of the best leftovers of the year… so good that Rick REQUESTS leftovers for his birthday dinner on the 26th. His birthday is kind of a bum deal to him being so close to Christmas so I have offered to make him anything else he might rather have. I’ll admit that I’m glad he likes leftovers because it’s less work for me all over again. At the same time I usually have hot dogs or hamburgers on my birthday so he’s sort of lucky there, I guess.
We spent the early part of the day still trying to make up for the 24 hours I spent in bed and I made my last batch of cookies… we were still missing some of the cookies we like to make but there has to be a quitting point. These are butter cookies; a recipe from a quaint little book of traditional Christmases in Martha’s Vineyard that my Aunt gave me in my first year or two of being away from home. You can do anything with these delicious butter cookies which makes it the best butter cookie recipe in the world. I choose to make swirled cookies that I then slice and bake… so good! After my crafts were finished up and some more laundry done we began dinner preparations. You’d never believe the size of the bag of hash browns for our “cheesy potato bake” unless my 4 year old held it up. This took some muscle on her part. Half is used at Christmas and the other half is used at Easter!
During the 24 hour process it takes to make 7-layer jello we had a slight mis-hap with a certain curious kitten who suddenly looked like she was bleeding and dripping blood everywhere. I grabbed her hind leg out of the measuring cup of dissolving raspberry jello, rescued the hot rolls she was dripping on and gave her foot a good bath which, by the way, she hated. Then I cleaned up the puddle on the floor. Good thing Scruffles is so cute… I was laughing the whole time.
We had a wonderful ham with an apricot glaze. These are the “small” dinner rolls and the half that didn’t get dripped on with jello. The other rolls were twice the size but harder for younger children to handle and eat. As it is, we have a menagerie of squirrels outside our kitchen window waiting for free handouts from our younger eaters for their holiday meal .
We set a beautiful table with our best dishes, candles and a table cloth. The table cloth is a formality that doesn’t occur as often as it once did but I like it.
Then we got our dessert ready which is really a sampling of the cookies we’ve made over the past couple of weeks. No need for anything additional. There are buckeyes, chocolate softies (mint and non-mint), chocolate peanut butter chip cookies (Haley’s contribution this year), holiday fudge, swirled butter cookies, snowballs with candy cane kisses hiding within and east-end bars of which I was missing the green half this year when I ran out of food coloring completely (except for blue). We each take a cookie and put it on our glass plate for Santa and then we can enjoy the rest just before bedtime.
Nathan was finding all of the waiting difficult. He loves to sing songs which he did plenty of to help pass the time. Then we found him “waiting for Santa” IN the couch. Hmmmm! I wonder if Santa would notice that our couch has a little face? After our dinner we bundled up not too heavily and went through the dark quiet streets of our neighborhood to enjoy the lights in the yards and on the houses. Lindsay and I noticed that Nathan began dragging his feet a little as we held his hands so Rick scooped him up and stuck him on his shoulders. The length of our walk is longer for little legs but we hadn’t gotten much further when, for the second year in a row, we saw Santa walking down the street!!! He said “Ho! Ho! Ho! Better hurry and get to sleep… Santa’s a little early this year”. The younger kids were so excited!!!! We said “Merry Christmas, Santa!”
About two minutes later our littlest boy started drooping and sagging over Rick’s shoulder. He was fast asleep!!! Santa must have waved a magic wand.
And he stayed asleep for the next hour while we read the account of Christ’s birth from the Bible, then the account of it from the Book of Mormon and all during singing around the piano. Rick got a new Christmas Music book last year for Christmas that we sang from and it had a few fun songs to sing in rounds that were new to most of us that I haven’t heard or sung since childhood. There were also many songs with two and three part harmonies for us to sing as well as our favorite traditional hymns.
After baths (as this is getting-ready-for-church-night too) the plate of cookies and a cup of milk was set out on the table and the magical Santa key was hung outside on our front door so Santa can get into our “no fireplace” home, the house settled down. Soft sounds of Christmas floated easily through the air from the stereo. Stockings were hung on curtain rod ends this year… the house was too damp for our hooks to hold to the wall! Her very first Christmas, Scruffles curiously watched the feathery shadows on the ceiling created from the lights on the tree in the dim room and the kitties settled in comfortably to await Santa’s arrival with heads nodding.
Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!
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