Hi Everyone!

Sorry I’ve been away for a couple of days. I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season! Things are going well here in Rhode Island – I am enjoying the mini-vacation I am on.

Christmas eve Ben and I arrived at my family’s house in Rhode Island around 1pm. We enjoyed a lunch with my mom of chicken salad and hot tea! Eventually we went over to our extended family’s house for Christmas Eve celebrations. It was a lot of fun! I enjoyed a Cesar salad, veggies and a piece of bread for dinner. For dessert I had two peanut butter kiss cookies that my friend Tim made – they were amazing! He is emailing me the recipe – Tim, don’t forget!

It was hard to get to sleep on Christmas Eve because I was really excited for my family to open their presents in the morning! But eventually I was able to get to sleep, and when I woke up it was Christmas Day. I felt like a little kid over the last couple of days because I was so excited about the holidays!

On Christmas morning I enjoyed a slice of my mother’s famous pumpkin bread (with chocolate chips baked in!) and a great cup of coffee – in a Christmas mug! 🙂

We enjoyed a morning of opening presents. Among other things, I received two great cookbooks, and a new saute pan – and I am so excited to start using all of them.

After presents, I helped my mom make her much requested carrots that we were bringing over to family for Chrismas “dinner” (which is always served around 3pm on Christmas day).  We used mom’s new Cuisinart food processor which I love!  It was soo easy to chop the carrots up!

When we got to our extended family’s house – I enjoyed a couple of shrimp cocktail – they were soo good!

I took this picture with the new digital camera Ben and I gave my mom – a new Canon Powershot. I love this camera! It takes amazing pictures – I think the shrimp look so pretty 😉

For Christmas dinner I enjoyed a great plate of food. There was a meat (some sort of beef, I’m not too much of a meat eater – but this was very good!) I enjoyed a small piece of Ben’s piece of meat along with mashed potatoes, green beans with almonds, carrots and a crescent roll. The green beans and carrots were my favorite. The mashed potatoes were fantastic especially with the homemade au jus! Here is what my dinner plate looked like:

A couple of hours after dinner I enjoyed dessert. I tried all three pies and the plate looks very strange, since there were slivers of each pie and they didn’t stay together very well!

The pies were: pecan pie, lemon cheese cake and apple pie – all of them were great! But I particularly love the lemon cheesecake because it is very light and fluffy!

After dessert the “kids” all went to see a movie. We saw The Spirit. I have to say, I did not like the movie – but it was fun to keep up with our Christmas tradition of going to a movie after family dinner.

My sister, Ben and I got home from the movie at around 10 o’clock last night. We stayed up with my mom and chatted for a while – and went to bed late again 🙂 We’ve been having a lot of fun being together!

I hope everyone has been having a great holiday season! I will post more shortly – today is also the day that I have to make my Amish Friendship bread – because the starter is ready! Fun times!