Christmas Holidays 2013

The 2013-14 Christmas Holiday Season is now officially in the history books. Over the January 11-12 weekend, we carefully dismantled the decorations and adornments in the house, labelled everything in its box, stored it back downstairs, and then cleaned and vacuumed. All traces of Christmas 2013 are now in storage. As always, the Christmas tree was last to go, its lights signalling the festive season until the very last minute as the Christmas music CDs get one last play while the takedown tasks are done.

With plenty of presents for friends, family and even cats, our trusty Christmas tree came out of storage for its 14th season helping us celebrate the Christmas Season. It is always the last thing to come down and go back into storage.

We had a lovely Christmas tree, and a warm and festive Holiday Season this year. Mom was at our home for almost two weeks. Zach brought Jenny for Christmas and for my New Year’s Eve birthday. The turkey came out just right.

Despite the ice storm start to the Christmas Season, the holidays were warm and pleasant. We never lost electricity, and even throughout Mississauga, everyone’s electricity was restored within hours for those few who were affected.

On the 23rd, we had Bob’s office staff over to get their presents and celebrate with us, and then for two days, Bob and I cooked and prepared for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We had a house full of family and guests on Christmas Day, including Bob’s Constituency Assistant Humaira, who is recovering from cancer treatment very well, and came with her husband Hamayun and one-year old baby Jibran. As well, Mississauga East Cooksville MPP Dipika Damerla came with her daughter for Christmas dinner.

As is our custom, right after Christmas, we went into our cocoon and enjoyed some private time, doing little more than reading, watching movies and puttering around the house. It is one of two times each year where Bob gets to read up on what is new in web and software development, and try and keep his code-writing skills somewhere near what the state-of-the-art is at the time.

It takes the better part of a few days to decorate the house between late November and the first week of December, and two very full days of work to take everything down, and meticulously box and label it all so that we can find it next year. Christmas, for us, is contained in about 25 very full boxes lovingly organized downstairs. It works. There have been few frustrations as we carry everything upstairs and put it all back together 11 months later, and the extra effort is really worth it.

A new recipe

This year, we enjoyed some of our time in the ‘great indoors’ doing more than the usual bread-making. We do bread the traditional way, with traditional yeast, and two bread risings before baking it in the oven. No bread-makers and instant yeast in this house! I’ve published one of the recipes we enjoy from time to time, but had never shared prior to this year: our buttermilk bread. Click the link to see how to make it, and enjoy it. As the caption notes, we photographed those two loaves just a few minutes after they had come out lof the oven, and we had tasted them. Yummy!

Have a happy and healthy 2014, everyone…