Ahhh, Christmas!

I will never, ever make the same mistake again that I made today: I made my stuffing recipe today with whole wheat bread. Horror of horrors, it actually looked healthy!

Now, I have to say that with a qualifier of course. I have nothing against healthy food (who would?), but when you are making the carb fest that is stuffing with ground pork and LOTS of butter, it should at least look like it might be something you shouldn't eat everyday. Wheat bread in stuffing is a bit like false advertising, I would imagine: "Hey, look, the bread is dark! It must have been made with the whole wheat berry and not with that bleached stuff!" No, just look like what you are. :-)

We had a fantastic and culinarily diverse Christmas this year, not like last year when we had literally no money to do anything but buy candy from the dollar store. My father is a bit of a wine connossieur and lately he has been experimenting with creating his own wines. The first couple of batches were so-so (read: tasted as sulfurous as licking a match), but this year he hit on the most fantastic white wine I've ever tasted. I am not a white wine drinker, but I might have been made into one! He gave us our own bottle of it, which we drank and used for cooking a fabulous cheese sauce to dip tortilla chips in.

That wine, accompanied by summer sausage, shrimp, cookies, crackers, and smoked salmon, made up our Christmas Eve dinner/snack. No empty stomachs this Christmas Eve...

And this was also the first year that our older son, The Amazing Omnivorous Child, really understood what the presents under the tree were for. We spent a hilarious morning recording his gift-unwrapping antics to save for posterity. He was so excited he was screaming and laughing at the same time! He got two dinosaurs, a motorcycle wind-up toy, a toy car, and lots of candy. The Amazing Flying Child got chewy plastic chain links. He has no appreciation for cars and motorcycles.

Ahhh, Christmas. I love it. Praise God for coming into this world and saving it from itself.

-- Nick