The Aftermath

Christmas went wonderfully! Since we do most of our celebrating on the Eve, I spent the day doing prep for dinner. I was a little late choosing my recipes this year but I served:

Appetizers:
Hot Crab and Shrimp dip with crackers and bread for dipping
Raw veggies with Dill or Ranch dip
Shrimp Cocktail, fresh from Ultra Foods
Pre celebratory beverage of choice. I chose beer or should I say, Joe did. He chose for me a Microbrew called Downtown Brown.

Salad:
Spring Spinach salad. Nice and basic Spinach salad with fresh raspberries, walnuts, onions and a homemade poppyseed dressing.

Main Dish
Shrimp with Tarragon sauce served on Jasmine rice and a bed of wilted spinach. It was pretty good but it needed a little more lemon juice. If I make it again, I'll make a note of it.
Wheat rolls
2 bottles of chilled white wine.

Dessert:
Home made cookies
Some desserts my boss sent

This is a once a year thing. I'm no gourmand but on those rare occasions I decide to make dinner, I cook something nice. My children any other time of the year, live on 101 ways to make Mac and Cheese though I have been known to make a roast something now and then with some sort of marinade, glaze or sauce.

After cleanup and the arrival of the grandparentals, Santa came. Emily was all about her packages. She ripped through like Hurricane Katrina and when there were no more boxes left, she started on everyone elses.

I got my son a cell phone. Yes, I caved, OK! But I did make it clear to him that if he downloads anything that costs me money, he will be paying for it and if he texts himself to oblivion, he'll be paying for that too. Yes, I have a cell phone and it's a rather nice one, a nice Motorola Razr phone that came with an instruction book 2 inches thick on all the bells and whistles attached to the phone. It takes pictures. I can surf the net. I can play games, set up alarms and I'm sure it can fix the sink and clean my house. I don't care. I want it to a) make a call b) receive a call. I use about 10 minutes a month, 60 during the months my friend Ron calls and I had about 4000 rollover minutes prior to giving Kris the phone. I think I'm now down to 2. But he loves it and when he opened it up, I loved the look of disbelief. Cass got a digital camera and she's been such a pain in the ass with it, I'm ready to hit her with it. She has taken 100 pictures .....of HERSELF. Look mom, here I am smiling. Here I am looking sad. Here I am looking scared. Here you are right after you woke up with your hair all over and that dead "where's the coffee?" look But she loves it so what can I say? Emily got a little set of stainless steel cookware and a set of little plastic dishes plus some My Little Ponies and associated accessories. It seems Santa forgot to bring some food to cook in her little cookware but Emily is industrious. She is just frying up the little ponies. We've had Pony Tetrazzini, pony surprise, pony AuGratin...
We've been eating ponies all week.

Now it is back to work.
I hope your Christmases were just as nice!