Festive floof! A little early but WHATEVER! I wanna know...
amylou321
3 years ago
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Floof!! Waaaaay too early.
Comments (30)We love to decorate at Christmas time. My other favorite is Halloween but I don't put up that much stuff except for on Halloween night. I have an Easter wreath for the front door and that's about it for Easter. Same goes for Saint Patrick's Day. We don't put up more than a wreath but we still celebrate it usually by watching Harrison Ford's version of The fugitive. I was very surprised when my daughter said she wanted me to keep all of the Christmas decorations. I was trying to downsize so she wouldn't have anything to deal with but she vehemently protested. DS and DN are not interested in any kind of decoration Etc. So it all goes to my daughter. We store our Christmas stuff in one closet in the spare room. I was hoping it to get it down to half of the closet but that's okay as we would not use it anyway. The Easter Thanksgiving and Halloween decorations are all in one container and are in our garage....See MoreFestive floof! Celebrating then and now.
Comments (8)I liked Christmas as a child, but once I became an adult, it was more stressful than anything else, and my mother took it too seriously. She felt compelled to have everyone together for Christmas, and this became more difficult when the family got larger and had other places to go. I left home at 18, and so after that, I returned as a guest. I have no holiday traditions of my own, although I used to celebrate the summer solstice when I lived in Venice, as that was a good time to have a party there. When I did visit my parents for Christmas and/or Thanksgiving, I would do much of the cooking, partly because my mother did not like to do it and partly because I was better at it, and my nieces especially appreciated it. I found exchanging gifts to be more stressful than enjoyable, and so I did not like that as an adult. We sometimes played board games, and I did enjoy that. As a child, we alternated having Christmas at my parents' house and at my maternal grandparents' house. My mother was an only child, and so her parents were always with us at holidays. My father had two older brothers and an older sister, and we never celebrated any holidays with them. His sister had moved to New Mexico, and we almost never saw her at all. His two brothers had married two sisters, and so they were very close to each other but not to us. Since their children were double first cousins, they were much like one family (and closer to each other in ages). My father's family was not big on Christmas, partly because his sister had converted to Jehovah's Witness (because of her husband), and she had converted my grandmother. I believe that JWs do not celebrate Christmas, as I remember, but my grandmother was not the typical JW. In fact, being inventive (with a couple of patents under her belt), she had created her own version of the religion, probably from her imagination, which was far from conventional. No one knew where she got her ideas, but she did enjoy going out and witnessing. However, when the other JWs found out what she was telling others, they tried to get her to stop witnessing, but to no avail. I was told not to listen to my grandmother because she was "off her rocker," but I found her stories entertaining and imaginative. My grandmother owned the waterworks in town because my grandfather (who died before I was born) and his father had dug a bunch of artesian wells, and so the people in town pretty much had to put up with her, even though they thought she was a bit crazy. She never forced people to pay their water bills, and so my father had to do that for her. She thought water should be free. Anyway, my father's side of the family did not celebrate Christmas in a conventional way....See MoreFestive Floof! Feast Photos!
Comments (25)PM, the ”hard” in hard sauce refers to whiskey, but is often brandy or rum, and I felt no compuntion with the liqueur. Your great-grandmother's recipe sounds interesting, One ancestress of mine was in the WCTU. She would have approved! I wonder if it was a Prohibition era thing. Mine was the whipped pumpkin gravy, which was made with a but of butter and cream, and impressively stable (no drippings)m just thinned a bit and heated with the GM. Not the traditional butteriness and booziness of hard sauce, but a similar texture and sharp enough with the GM. For the bread pudding, I did add a few shakes of Vietnamese cinnamon and a shake and a half of cloves to the custard to unify things, but the spices from the rolls (fenugreek and some others) and the pumpkin filling, sweetness frome the latter, a whiff of salt frome the former, and the pistachios, whick pretty much kept their coatings. There was also a lot of butter in both the rolls and the babka. The most amazing bread puddings come from irreproducible breads!...See MoreFestive Floof! Thanksgiving 2023 plans?
Comments (40)Oh man, it all looks delicious. At first I was concerned, then I saw the pink bowl for the stuffing and the pink pan holding spinach dip and all was right with the world. It's amylou, it's gotta have something pink. I think George has taken the correct measures, LOL. He looks a lot like my 25 pound cat, Spark. Orange cats gotta do orange cat things, you know. My Thanksgiving won't be until next Saturday, that's when Ashley has the girls and Makayla can come home for dinner and all other family obligations are fullfilled by all. Elery and I joined the neighbors at the B&B for dinner, the chef there did the cooking and I provided some of the "raw" ingredients. Well brined free range Amish turkey, nearly 30 pounds, some apple/cranberry stuffing, green bean casserole with no C of M soup, just some nicely seasoned white sauce and crunchy pan fried shallots, mashed potatoes from our Kennebecs in storage, gravy, fresh cranberry relish and dinner rolls, dessert was a really nicely spiced apple cake with cream cheese frosting. A couple of cups of coffee, chatting with friends and rooting for the Detroit Lions (who, true to tradition, lost), made a lovely day. Having lost my mother and my brother within the last year it was actually good to have something completely different. I'll start my cooking about Wednesday... Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Annie...See Moreamylou321
3 years agoamylou321
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoamylou321
3 years agoamylou321
3 years agoamylou321
3 years agolast modified: 3 years ago
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