Christmas: Now With More Food, Fewer Teeth, and Ping-Pong

Um, hello? It seems I’ve been neglecting my little blog a bit. Well, all sorts of festive things have been going on while poor Musical Soup Eaters has been sitting here alone and unloved.

For starters, Christmas happened, obviously. My family has our big Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve. There were so many wonderful foods, it was almost overwhelming. I made my second-ever turkey. This time I didn’t brine it, but it still turned out pretty tasty. I made butternut squash cheddar gratin, corn pudding, and spinach artichoke dip. More cookies than I can remember. Some mint fudge that failed to set, but was still tasty heated up and poured over ice cream. There were all sorts of other delicious foods other people made that I also did not take pictures of. There was something with oysters, sweet potatoes with a gingersnap topping, and a roasted parsnip bread pudding.

My cousins made gorgeous treats, like these chocolate, peanut buttery, pretzelly delights.

And these gorgeous truffles.

Of course, cookies were left out for Santa, along with carrots for Rudolf.

Musical Soup Girl got the American Girl Doll she wanted. In spite of my hesitation, I am glad we got it for her. However, she wasn’t satisfied for long and started begging us for a puppy almost as soon as Christmas was over.

The doll’s name is Sunflower. She feels right at home with the doll-sized bed and table and chairs my parents gave her. Sunflower and Musical Soup Girl looked somewhat alike until Musical Soup Girl lost one of her upper front teeth a couple days after Christmas. It has been loose and askew for a while. We barely missed the great intersection of Santa and the Tooth Fairy. This is the third tooth she’s lost recently, and while her snaggle-toothed smile is cute, it does give me a bit of a country-bumpkin vibe sometimes.

For Christmas morning, I made homemade cinnamon rolls, which were generously blessed by the gods of butter and sugar.

They smelled heavenly as they baked Christmas morning.

So, you know how holidays tend to be the same, year after year? We tend to follow the same rituals, eat the same foods, etc. This year my parents shook things up by initiating competitive ping-pong. My mom had a trophy made. There were schedules and brackets.

I lost to my brother, but I was wearing heels so I should probably demand a rematch. This was all in good fun, except for Musical Soup Boy, who took the whole competition far too seriously. That child was born competitive.

After Christmas, we spent a few days in Port Aransas, where I took approximately zero pictures. Luckily, my uncle did.

I tend to feel a little blah right after Christmas. There’s so much build up, as soon as it’s over I sometimes feel a little let down. I’m contemplating new ways to combat this. For starters, I hosted a little get-together tonight to taste dishes from the Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook in preparation for a review I’m doing on Food Lush on January 7. I invited a couple people that I knew liked cooking, Downton Abbey, or both to help me test some recipes. It was so much more fun than it would have been to try some recipes on my own. Erica not only considered hunting down turtle meat, but also arrived in a tiara. I adore her for this.