Christmas Time

Things are fairly subdued at our house this week before Christmas, for which I am grateful.
I'm still finishing up one class. Grades have to be in by Saturday. Grace and Spencer have arrived home from college. Tucker is taking mid-term exams this week.
We decided to have 4-year-old Caroline over to bake and decorate cookies one afternoon.

After cutting out the cookies and baking them, let the decorating begin.

No one can concentrate on making a huge mess of yellow icing like a 4-year-old. This cookie, when she was finished, looked like it was attacked by a ketchup and mustard bottle. That's okay though cause we sent it home with her. 

Spencer stayed home that evening and on his phone found an idea for making "colored ice marbles." Put some water and food coloring in a balloon then put it out in the snow to freeze. 

"Let's do it," Grace proclaimed. So my 21-year-old and 20-year-old headed to the kitchen. They quickly learned to put the food coloring in before the water. They ended up with three filled balloons that they put in a snow bank to freeze til the next day. 

But two of the balloons were missing the next morning, leaving only a slightly blue tinted indentation and a yellow-ringed indentation. "Maybe they burst," Grace suggested.

And two blue footprints nearby hint at why they might have burst.

We suspect the outdoor cat, of course, even though this picture looks like an abominable snowman staring out of the snow bank.

Then last night we had a little drama. I was in the kitchen cooking chicken and dumplings, Grace was on the cough, both cats were accounted for and suddenly the Christmas tree toppled onto the floor followed by a tinkling sound as the glass topper broke. Three other bulbs also broke. One of them was our first year of marriage bulb, which I refuse to take as an omen. The other was Spencer's first year bulb, but I think he had two of them. The third may be the real omen -- The Ohio State bulb broke. It does not bode well for them in their bowl game if our tree has anything to say about it.

Hope everyone is having a calm Christmas season wherever you are.  

Thanksgiving Traditions -- Not So Much

This year was an odd Thanksgiving, so I tried to come up with some new traditions to add for my family. The one thing I hoped to do, bake cookies in the shape of a turkey, did not happen. Why, you may ask? Well, the turkey cookie cutter which I saw on Corey's blog, and which I felt sure I had in my stash of cookie cutters, was not there.
On that Wednesday, after my darling husband had already mixed up the cookie dough and placed it in the refrigerator, I called my mom. "Didn't we have a turkey-shaped cookie cutter?" I asked her.
She thought that we had.
"Did you keep that one?" I asked. She had handed over all the old cookie cutters to me. I didn't figure she'd kept out the turkey for sentimental reasons. So she laughed and said she'd look for it, but since she lives in Florida and I live in Ohio, I had no chance of getting it in time for Thanksgiving even if she found it.
I sent my darling husband in search of a turkey cookie cutter on the day before Thanksgiving. One of the worst days to go to a store, especially a grocery store. He looked at World Market, Kohls and Kroger. No luck.
I pulled out the big bag of cookie cutters. I could do leaves -- those are fine for autumn, and even though this leaf is obviously a holly leaf, it would pass. I could make some orange icing and call it a fall theme.

Then I looked at the cookie cutter that I have called a dove for years. I couldn't decide why it would be with the Christmas cookie cutters if it wasn't a dove, but it looks a bit more like a chicken. Could I somehow make it look like a turkey? I imagined trying to add some bigger tail feathers and some kind of wattle under its chin. That would never work.
So I went to work cutting out leaves, dove/chickens, hearts, some stars (which are universal, right?) and some Christmas trees, because those are the ones I like eating the most.
Once the cookies were all baked, about 45 of them, I mixed up the powdered sugar icing. I was ready to add the food coloring.
"What color?" I asked Earl.
"Red," he suggested.
So I pulled out all of my food coloring boxes and discovered that he must say "red" every year because each box was devoid of red. So I settled for green. Bright green.
I slathered on the icing and asked Earl to decorate with red hots and sprinkles. He must have been channeling Tucker as a small boy, because he loaded up those cookies.

So the finished products were colored perfections.They stayed on the waxed paper drying, until the first handful of boys walked through the kitchen on their way to the "man cave" in the basement.
What I discovered, as waves of boys moved through the kitchen, is that they don't really care what shape the cookies are in. They ate them all, except a few that didn't get iced.
Now I have a year to find a turkey cookie cutter. Unless you think I could somehow pass this dove/chicken off as a turkey. What do you think?