It Was a Very Merry Christmas, and Wishes for the New Year

Hello again, faithful readers and new friends! December came with a short "after Thanksgiving" rush to get everything prepared for Christmas, and all my thoughts about updating my blog fell by the wayside.  As you can see from the photos above we decorated as usual, although we also had to maintain the antics of two "elves on the shelf" every day as our oldest granddaughter was staying with us most of the time along with my daughter, who was recovering from heart valve surgery. Thankfully, our daughter was strong enough to return full time to her home after Christmas, and the elves will return to her home next year. Finding new situations and places for them to be every night, for our granddaughter to discover, created a lot of last-minute sneaking downstairs in the wee hours for us (smile). In case you don't know the legend behind the elves, click here.

There is also a photo of my husband in the collage above, pressing cooked potatoes as we prepared one of our favorite holiday traditional treats--savory Italian zeppole. You can see how we make these every year on this blog post: click here.

I was also busy baking the traditional Christmas cookies that my family enjoys every year, as well as a few Nordic Ware holiday pan pumpkin cakes.  You can find some of my cookie recipes here and the pumpkin bread recipe here.  This year I had extra fig, date, and nut filling leftover from making cookies and added it to the pumpkin bread dough. It made the cakes really extra moist delicious!  

As always, we hosted our traditional Italian Christmas Eve Fish Feast. My husband's family always made at least 13 different fish, so I follow suit.  My daughter helped me this year and it was so nice spending that time together. Everyone takes home a tray of leftovers and nothing goes to waste! This year my son's in-laws, including his sister-in-law and her family, were our guests.

Our four grand blessings!

Of course, we also had lots of fun all month! We made a gingerbread house, visited Santa Claus at a party at our neighborhood ranch house, went to a drive-through at a nearby "Christmas in Color" light show, and continued to move those pesky elves around the house!

We took a horse and carriage ride around our neighborhood...

...plus attended an "Old Fashioned Christmas" holiday open house at the beautiful 100 years plus Manor House that is located in our community. I have more photos to show, and an interesting history to tell about this house, that I'll share in my next post.

I wish you all a Healthy and Happy New Year, and a new decade! 2020!

Do you make resolutions or chose a special word to define what you hope for in the new year? My word is "health."

More than ever this year, we have learned the expression "health is wealth" to be true and we hope all the health challenges that my family faced will be behind us.  We hope to improve our health as much as possible this year and to be even more grateful for each new day.

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