A glorious Christmas: Wonderful presents, scrumptious food, and best of all, our beautiful family to enjoy. If I say it myself, dinner was great. Very, very basic and old-fashioned, in fact this is the Christmas dinner I almost invariably serve, with few deviations: A fat turkey (would love to try goose one day); the kind of stuffing my mother made (and not from bought "cubed" bread, either--Ellen tore apart the bread by hand); a variation stuffing in which Ellen put apples; peas with pearl onions; string bean casserole (Alison brought that, but it was never "traditional" with me--never made it in my life); banana bread; two kinds of cranberry sauce; mashed potatoes, gravy (okay, okay, I confess--that's about the only thing I don't make myself), black and ripe olives; wine, coffee, and soda; apple pie and pumpkin pie with whipped cream; chocolates, and after-dinner mints. I meant to make and buy fancy after-dinner drinks, but just forgot. This dinner, incidentally, is almost an exact duplicate of what I serve for Thanksgiving if it's at my house. I love new and exotic food, too, and if I'm elsewhere, certainly have no prejudice against almost anything added or subtracted--just like to stick to the tried-and-true myself.
Not food, but food-related: Again, if I say it myself, the table looked beautiful--so festive with the Chistmas dishes I bought eons ago, and gold tableware (thanks to sister Betty's birthday gift of several years ago). I supplemented with the heirloom china that had been my mothers's and used a beautifully embroidered tablecloth and hand-crocheted cloth over that. They look great and go perfectly with the table setting, but are hardly heirlooms: I bought the undercloth at Habitat for Humanity and the over one at a yard sale in Allentown, NJ. The woman I bought it from said her aunt in Germany had crocheted it years ago. How could anyone ever sell such a treasure?
The downside to the lovely table: Everything has to be washed by hand. If I didn't have Ellen here, I probably would have been up until midnight. As it was, we spent more than an hour cleaning up, but hey, who's counting? It was worth it.
Oh, yeah, my food tally: Everything I could get in my mouth--ha, ha!