Christmas 2023

Christmas 2023 started rough when the tree came crashing down and destroyed most of the ornaments and jewels; along with one of the rings.

I’d been meaning to add some kind of winch system for years, but I was finally motivated to get one installed. Then the Modern Christmas Tree (https://www.modernchristmastrees.com/) people restrung the tree and sold us some demo ornaments so we could try again. It went up a lot smoother this time. I didn’t put up any exterior ornaments this year because the roof still needs to be inspected and the gutter guards need fixing.

One of our friends suggested that rib roast was the only proper meal to serve at Christmas, which was very strange to me because I’d never heard of this tradition before. But I’ve never made a rib roast before, so I made it for Christmas Eve along with some Yorkshire pudding.

I was surprised that the rib roast was really just the same cut as a ribeye, so that was pretty hard to screw up. We make Dutch Babies all the time, and it turns out that Yorkshire pudding is just a variant of a Dutch baby. The recipe wasn’t very good, so I would make a lot of changes if I ever made it again. The sticky toffee pudding was good, but I think I made a vegan version earlier this year that was better.

We opened the house up for Christmas Day and made wayyy to much food, as usual. Luckily not that many people came out because we tried all new recipes and were disappointed with most of them. Some of the things we made included:

* Maple glazed ham
* Mini corn muffins with spicy cheddar filling (Not good)
* Skillet Dinner rolls with Garlic Herb Butter (Weird recipe)
* Slow cooker candied nuts (Not candied. Not good.)
* Butterscotch Gingerbread cookies
* Holiday Orange Spice Cake (Vegan & bad, which was expected)
* Gingerbread Cookies (GF unless 1tsp of Eggnog has gluten in it)
* Lemon Cookies (Vegan and GF)
Caramelized Onion & Hummus Dip Crostini (very good)
Xmas Tree Spinach Dip (meh)
Pull apart Maple bacon rolls (was ok, they looked really good though)
Brie Bites (meh)

Lina wanted a vintage shell toilet seat for Christmas, and I got her one. But it broke after I finished cleaning, polishing, and replacing parts. It was too late to replace or save before Christmas; but luckily a man had visited the Philippines in the 70’s and brought back a 4.5′ carved mask and was getting ready for a move. His wife told him “That has to go”, and he posted this ad on Craigslist: