Christmas Celebrations

Merry Christmas Everyone!

I hope that you had a fabulous holiday season. We spent the 24th and 25th with the German family, continuing with the Steinbach/Hillebrand traditions. This time we took far too many pictures but here is a quick overview!

First we started with the traditional meal on the evening of the 24th at Friedhelm and Christa's house. The food was extra yummy and the present-sharing very sweet. Here is a picture of the clan (missing Gio) in front of the tree.

After dinner, we went over to Oma Else's house for the tradition singing, eating, drinking, story sharing and arm wrestling. I have no idea how or when the arm wrestling started but this year the Mr. was the champ. The Mrs. was, as usual, the worst in the house!

Per tradition, the Mrs. fell fast asleep on the couch in the middle of the party, music blaring and laughter ringing, until it was time to stumble home, half-asleep and with a little too much alcohol in our systems.

On the 25th we ate yummy food again, took two naps, and then chilled into the evening.

More photos are here.



xo

Merry Christmas to the Mr.

I'm not comforted, I'm positive.

From PostSecret.com

xo

Our Tree

Its okay to be jealous.

More pictures here.



xo

Turkey Turkey Turkey & Some Stuffing

We invited Dominik's family for a full ‘Thanksgiving Dinner’ this afternoon. The prep for the dinner ended up being Project 4 as I kept myself busy with searching, shopping, and preparing the right dishes and stuff on Thursday and Friday.


Yesterday we got the stuffing together as well as prepped as many dishes as possible; today I woke up at 6:30 in the morning to stick the turkey in the oven and drink coffee. Lots of coffee.

Based on the Lambert Lessons, the turkey ended up fab.u.lous and you are all jealous that you weren’t here for it. :)

The stuffing was a great recipe from the Food Network, a favorite website of mine. It has apple, celery, cranberry, and sausage in it. I also added cashews because I like them. It ended up excellent. Unfortunately I couldn’t find quality sausage that wasn’t already in intestine (yes, you read that right), I got to “free” one entire kilo, piece by piece. It looked something like this:

And I was about this happy with the experience:

In the end, although the recipe said it would fill one large pan, I ended up with this amount of stuffing:

We have a ton left over, and I’m looking forward to each bite. All in all it was a great afternoon with the greater Steinbach Family, what a group of good-looking peps.

More pictures here. 



xo

Keeping Busy is the Best Treatment

These days I'm on homestay on doctor's orders and trying to get 'all better'. And since I've been known to be übergut with free, empty time...I'm getting through homestay and trying to get all better through the invention and completion of projects.


Project One:
Get Christmas tree in the house and into its stand. This one was quickly accomplished with the Mr. easily, happily, and in the rain. It took a little bit to bring it into the house, but we finally did it.

Peewee likes the tree too. Ornaments and candles will be put onto it this Saturday.

Project Two:
Two friends came around to join in the adventure of baking cookies together. I’m not a big fan of ‘real’ Christmas cookies, and surprisingly, they weren’t either. So we created chocolate cookies shaped like little pretzels (yummy); cookies with walnuts and chocolate (yummy); chocolate chip cookies with handmade chips (yummy); and licorice rock candy (not so much).

Here are the handmade chips:

Lesson learned: stick with the chocolate recipes cause that’s what we know best.

Project Three:
I'm not a huge fan of white kitchens, but our apartment came with one of the nicest kitchens ever, and it just happens to be a creamy, white color. I've wanted to paint the background ever since we moved in so that the kitchen could POP out and I finally got it done.

It was a very structured, well-prepared project and took a total of, maybe three hours. I knew what I didn’t want, so I did a quick google-search for warm colors, clicked around and 20 minutes later set out to the local hardware store with the color ‘coral’ in mind. There the owner and I talked about light and feeling and agreed on a color. I paid, walked home and threw it on the wall.

Done.

And I love it.

More photos on snapfish.

...and, I'm sure, more projects to come...hopefully more time intensive.




xo.

On Request

In exchange for making me smile earlier today although I'm feeling quite crappy - a picture of my baby brother, also known as Bubby. On his request (or better said complaint).

xo

For the Record

Need I say more?

Postsecret.

xo