Category: HOLIDAYS

DAY 12 ~ BLOGMAS 2017 ~ WINTER TAG


✨Top 2 Winter Beauty Essentials

  • A NICE HOT SHOWER to relax and clean out the pores.
  • A super moisturizer to keep away dry skin!

✨Top 2 Winter Fashion Essentials

  • I wait ALL year for it to be cold enough to bring out the boots! I can’t wait until we move – I HATE the  lack of winter living here!
  • Scarves and gloves.  I have color combos to match anything.

✨ Favorite Winter Accessory

  • HATS & SCARVES!!!!

✨ Favorite Winter Nail Polish

  • Red for Christmas, but normally a pinky mauve. I just have too much red in my complexion to pull off many colors though this year I am wearing TEAL for Ovarian cancer awareness.

✨ Hot Cocoa or Apple Cider?

  • Homemade hot cocoa and MUST have marshmallows!

✨ Favorite Winter Candle?

  • Apple and Cinnamon

✨ Does it snow where you live?

  • Not here at all. I can’t wait to be back somewhere it does though.

✨Have you ever made a snowman?

  • Absolutely! And a snow woman and snow kids!

✨What is Your Favorite Holiday Movie?

  • Home Alone, Miracle on 34th Street and they never get old.  

✨What is Your Favorite Christmas Color?

  • Red and silver. 

✨Stay in Your PJs Or Dress Up For Christmas?

  • I always dress up.

✨If You Could Only Buy One Person a Present This Year Who Would It Be?

  • WOW, can “one” person just be one age group, all the kids in my life? This is a hard one.  I love buying presents for everyone. 

✨Do You Open Your Present Christmas Eve Or Christmas Morning?

  • It used to be Christmas Eve when I was a kid though we saved the Santa presents for Christmas morning. Now we open them Christmas morning.

✨What Do You Like To Do On Your Christmas Break?

  • Wait, there’s a Christmas Break? I don’t seem to get an actual break, but I do allow myself a holiday movie or two throughout my day as I’m working.

✨Any Christmas Wishes?

  • To have my house done so we can actually enjoy it for awhile before we sell it.  Safe travels for everyone over the holidays and world peace.  Was that too Miss America?  I really do want peace for EVERYONE!

✨Favorite Christmas Smell?

  • A fresh cut tree, baking cookies full of spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cloves)

✨Favorite Christmas Meal Or Treat?

  • Prime Rib
  • Fudge
  • Corn flake wreaths

✨What are you doing for the holidays this year?

  • Staying home and recuperating

✨What’s your favorite holiday drink?

  • Coffee
  • Hot Cocoa
  • Hot toddies

✨Candy cane or Gingerbread men?

  • I like the chalk style peppermint, but I’m not real keen on actual candy canes and I like soft gingerbread men.

✨What’s your favorite holiday/Christmas song?

  • That’s a tough call – depends on my mood… White Christmas, Silent Night and I’ll Be Home for Christmas

✨What is most important to you about the holidays? 

  • That it is genuine and homemade for the most part.  It is not a commercial holiday for me.  I believe in trying to remember the real reason for the season and keep the Christmas spirit in my heart and life ALL year long.

DAY 10 – BLOGMAS 2017 – HANDMADE GIFTS

HANDMADE CHRISTMAS FAVORITES

Over the years I have made everything, and I do mean everything at one time or another to create a handmade Christmas. I’ve made rolls and rolls of butcher paper into wrapping paper, cut grocery bags into handmade tags, made enough fudge, candies and cookies to feed a small country, as well as jams, jellies, soup mixes and Snowman soup!

My award winning jams were requested one year at the Church Christmas Boutique and I ended up selling them every year for another 10 years before we moved.  Now I make just enough for gifts for neighbors and family.  I started making Snowman Soup about 20 years ago for the girl scouts and it was a HUGE seller at our gift wrap days and later for the Church Boutique.

For the things I didn’t make myself, I at least bought from local crafters.
As for receiving, I love ANYTHING handmade.  I’m a BIG believer that it’s the thought that counts and that caring action ALWAYS touches my heart though I’m partial to cotton crocheted dishcloths, my brothers photographs, my mom’s quilted totes and ANYTHING food.

DAY 9 ~ BLOGMAS 2017 ~ WINTER WONDERLAND MEMORY PICTURES

I can’t actually get to the disks with pictures from some of our more favorite Christmases so will share these 2013 ones with you.  This was a great year as we actually had lots of snow in Oregon. We loved living so close to the Christmas tree farm also.  Beautiful trees for reasonable costs unlike here.

The year had been VERY wet which is the normal, but an arctic storm blew in and all of a sudden everything turned white. This was our first snowstorm of the season, just before Christmas.
Hubby made this heart for me to wake up to in the back yard before the snow got too bad.

The house across the street usually looks REALLY horrible, but NOT when it’s under a blanket of snow.

Unfortunately, being in a cul-de-sac, delivery tracks leave MANY tire tracks at this time of year to mar the beautiful snow cover.
Even Rudolph was shivering!
Even Rudolph was shivering!
The first day after he storm was absolutely gorgeous though! This is one of my favorite pictures. The duck pond behind the neighborhood was truly a work of art.
Obviously we hadn’t gone anywhere – no tire tracks!
The fish ladder was like glass with the cold and ice.

DAY 8 – BLOGMAS 2017 – FAVORITE CHILDHOOD MEMORY

WOW there are so many! My very first personal is when I was 9, my aunt coming to visit from Texas around that same time and sitting on the floor in a leather dress playing Barrel of Monkeys with the younger kids or maybe the year I got my first bike, whoops wait maybe that was the birthday before Christmas.

My grandfather worked for General Electric as an X-ray technician of sorts (he oversaw the installation and calibration of X-ray equipment) and one year he brought home a GE Snow tree and ornaments (I still don’t know the correlation between between being an X-ray technician and Christmas trees). Anyway this tree had a HUGE decorated cardboard base and once the tree was up and decorated you filled this base with thousands of tiny Styrofoam balls and when you turned the switch on the tree would make it’s own snow.  As a kid I thought it was pretty cool, but as an adult I look back and realize what a MESS it made!! Especially when the wind was blowing and static electricity was high – those damn balls stuck to EVERYTHING!

But wait, that is not my favorite memory.  It turns out that my favorite memory is of trying to stump my dad each year with his gift – it became a mission of sorts to be the first to stump him.  I swear the man was Carnac when it came to knowing what was inside a box. We tried EVERY year to stump him and I don’t remember ever being able to do it.  We tried adding bricks, taping a silver dollar with duct tape to the bottom so it would flip back and forth to make noise when you shook it, adding a pair of shoes… but he ALWAYS guessed!  I don’t know how he did it.

REINDEER NIBBLES

REINDEER NIBBLES
2/3 cup honey
2/3 cup creamy peanut butter
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon PURE vanilla extract
4 cups regular oats (uncooked)
1 cup unsalted peanuts, slightly chopped
1 1/2 cups golden raisins
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
2 cups melted CandyQuick

  • Preheat oven to 300°.
  • Whisk together the honey, peanut butter and cinnamon in a small sauce pan over medium heat, stirring constantly until thoroughly heated through. DO NOT BOIL.
  • Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.
  • In a large bowl pour peanut butter mixture over the oatmeal, stir to combine.
  • Spread oats in a jelly roll pan sprayed with non-stick cooking spray.
  • Bake for 25 minutes, stirring occasionally
  • Return oats to large mixing bowl and stir in peanuts, chocolate chips and raisins.
  • Spread oat mixture back into jelly roll pan and return to oven.
  • Turn oven off and let cool in oven for 90 minutes, stirring occasionally and keeping the door closed.
  • Remove from oven.
  • Melt CandyQuick in 30 second increments until pourable.  Stir after each 30 seconds.
  • Pour CandQuick over oat mixture and freeze for 1 hour.
  • Break apart into pieces.
  • Store in an airtight container.

NOTE: The pieces that are at the bottom make a great granola!

SHARING with FOODIE FRIDAY and TASTY THURSDAY.