Christmas Pictures.....

Today will be my Christmas post with snaps.
So if you have had enough jingle jangle jingle you may want to skip this one.....

I spend every Christmas at my sisters home in Vancouver, Washington as does my Mom. She flew up from Daytona Beach on Wednesday and I flew up on the Thursday before Christmas. We have as do most families certain rituals and traditions that happen just about every year, and it really make it a special time.

Over the past few years since Katie and Matt have both gotten older I have been making cookies with them. Cissy (their mother/my sister) lets them each pick a cookie to make and then when I get there we make them. This year Katie picked Gingerbread cutout cookies and Matt choose coconut Macaroons. The first ones we made were the cutout cookies. We used a family Kolbe recipe and it was a really nice one. Here is a snap of them before baking


Here is my little helper "helping."


I think that it was not so much the cookies as it was the decorating that she wanted to do.


She is very creative and does lots of drawing and painting and has even gotten interested in beading and jewelry making. (If you look in the background you can see a cookie jar my granny made, it is Santa Claus checking the good and bad children's gift list)

Matt choose coconut Macaroons, one of my favorite as coconut is at the top of list in my book!!
They are pretty easy to make and we used a scoop to get them all about the same size.




I think that what Matt wanted to do was the dipping part, and he was really very good at it!!



After we had finished dipping the Macaroons we had some peanut-butter crispies to do so we did those also...


These are really just Buckeye cookies with the addition if rice-crispies, which in my opinion make them very good. Here are the finished Macaroons...

We had some chocolate left from the dipping and so then we made peanut butter crackers and dipped them along with graham crackers....getting very "sprinkley" along the way......



One of our family traditions for as long as I can remember and it is going into my 4th decade, is that we have a birthday cake for baby Jesus. Since it is his birthday we celebrate, we do this to remember the "reason for the season." When I was growing up my mom would always make a Robert E Lee cake, which is a white cake, lemon filling with 7 min white/coconut frosting. Since we are at my sisters home she makes the Kolbe crazy cake and here is this years entry...


Crazy cake is dense chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting, delicious!!!!


I will leave off with a Christmas snow picture. For those of you that live with the stuff for months and just don't understand my excitement for frozen rain.....the last time I saw snow I was in Berchtesgaden when I visited the Eagles Nest there. So here is the one snap I will post. I took lots more and even a couple of movies (what that camera won't do, I tell ya)
It just made my trip!!!!!!

Alright just one more......



That's about it for today. Thanks for stopping by!!!!!

Take care,
edgar