Holiday Adventures

The Christmas haul was pretty good this year; Santa must have thought that I was a very good girl!

Jeff and I fill stockings for each other at Christmas. Last year, we were so excited that we opened them on Christmas Eve. This year, we made it past midnight and technically speaking, opened them on Christmas.

In addition to the gratuitous candy canes and chocolate, I also got an Elvis t-shirt, an Elvis watch, two sweaters, a sunflower-shaped baking pan, and a luxurious shower head. The shower head is actually a double shower head: it attaches up at the place where the pipe comes out of the wall, and there's a shower head right there, but also there's another hand-held shower head that is on a hose, and a valve that changes the flow of the water from one to the other. I'm pretty excited about all the gifts, but especially the shower head. It was one of those gifts that I wanted but hadn't thought of asking for.

I gave Jeff a similarly good gift. He had wanted a "Darth Tater" (Mr. Potato Head with Darth Vader costume parts) but it had not occurred to him to ask for it. But the look on his face was priceless when he saw it. He also got some of those M&M guys dressed up as Star Wars characters, some DVDs, and a book about Elvis. (Do you think we like Elvis in this household?)

Yesterday we had a big turkey dinner. In addition to the turkey, we had small red potatoes with rosemary, homemade rolls, cranberry/apricot sauce, and carrots. For dessert I made this delicious lemon pound cake in my new sunflower-shaped baking pan. I would just like to say that it was the best cake ever. I wish I knew what made it so good so that I could make another sometime. And while I was on this baking frenzy I also made a loaf of banana-chocolate chip bread. Now we have this enormous container full of baked goods: most of the pound cake, an entire loaf of bread, and a few slices of cranberry bread left over from when I made it for the office holiday party. I think we will probably take it with us to Kentucky when we leave on Wednesday.