Holiday Activities

This week we did some things to get us in the holiday spirit.  It was Cookie Day this week and Travis and Justin built and decorated a gingerbread house.  I love anything that involves eating and yummy smells, so these were both great activities!

Cookie Day was slightly less lofty this year.  I perused my cookbook and searched for some tasty treats to make for our neighbors and therapists and I realized that this would be my first solo Cookie Day.  I have always had either my sister or my mom (or both!) here to help and they are both gone.  I even broke down the day before and called my mom and asked her to come down for the day.  Cookie Day has become one of my favorite mother/daughter activities and I was missing her even thinking about it.  My mom was a Home Ec teacher and she always taught me so much about dough consistency and flavor combinations and substitutions and more.  She couldn't come despite her best efforts, so I had to do it on my own.  I decided to do better planning next year and have lots of people come help to make it more fun.  It's just more fun baking in groups!

I settled on 7 different kinds of cookies, with some bars, some drop, and one refrigerator variety.  Not all chocolate (but some of course!) one pumpkin, one cranberry, one lemon, one gingerbread/apple.  I even attempted my first meringue cookie!  (No wheat, so Justin-edible.)  Only one smores bar failed for lack of proper extraction from the pan, but it tasted good as we scraped it out with knives and fingers.  The rest were really tasty!  I didn't take pictures since I was too busy and on a deadline.  The kids watched too much TV, and I forgot to eat lunch (I did feed the boys!)  I went to a cookie exchange that night and traded a few white chocolate pumpkin cream cheese drops for everything under the sun.  Fortunately there was hearty soup at the cookie exchange to help rejuvenate me and bring me down from my sugar high!  The cookies I traded for were the only ones Randy and Travis could eat until I got the rest packed up and delivered and I knew what would be left over.

The next day I let the boys assemble the gingerbread house we bought last week.  Justin didn't help much last year so I was curious to see what he would do this year.  Well, he ended up digging right in!  After I got the walls erected and it was candy time, he enjoyed it just as much as Travis.  Justin is not a candy eater, which surprises me.  He puts everything small in his mouth, except candy.  Don't get it.  Travis did the top, and Justin managed the bottom.  Justin is very precise and Travis just sticks on the candy.  The result was a beautiful masterpiece!  What a combination of brotherly love!  (Oh, and you can see some of the cookies in the background of the pictures.)