christmas | sucrésalédeluxe

Christmas at my parent’s house is steeped in tradition. From our Christmas tree loaded with ornaments made as children and collected over the years, to our Christmas Eve movie to the music we listen to, almost everything brings back memories and has its own reason for being.

This year was different. So different that we started calling it ‘Imposter Christmas’. Ok, so that’s a little dramatic, but thank God for that, cause at least our penchant for drama has remained!

A little list of changes to Christmas this year:

No Christmas mass attended together, with all our coats (which have been heavily marinating in Christmas dinner seasonings and spices), giving off a scent and each of us sniffing and silently wondering “why is that incense so pungent this year!”
No White Christmas and no Bing! (gasp!)
No ridiculous amounts of christmas cookies and holiday treats baked
No copious amounts of food and leftovers in the fridge
And the craziest of all – No Christmas Tree (double gasp!!)

Despite these out of the ordinary happenings, we still managed some family classics: cheese straws and christmas cake, our annual family awards night, and my can’t-live -without-at-Christmastime “It’s a Wonderful Life”. At the end of it all, it was still great to be together as a family, and that’s what counts.

So my silver lining to forgetting my annual christmas tin chock full of cake and christmas eats … ? I’m going to have some seriously soaked rum cake when I get home this summer. Christmas in July anyone? 😉

It hasn’t felt like a long time at all, but my last post was in early December! I wonder if anyone is really interested in reading one more holiday blog or cookie recipe at this point… but what the heck, I’m writing it anyway. It is my final ode to Christmas 2011!

The end of the year and the Christmas season included travel, catching up with friends, lazy mornings spending time around the breakfast table with family, too much to do and too little time, traditional holiday baking and of course copious amounts of holiday eating. Yes, I ate more treats than I’d like to admit, but can I really be blamed? If there is one time of the year to indulge, it’s at Christmastime, especially with the chocolates and assorted treats we had from around the world and the sweets my family baked up.

Moccachino Extraordinaire with Belgian chocolate shavings

Though we did forgo a few of our holiday favourites such as the gingerbread and torrone, we had the essential classics: shortbread, sprinkled with red and green coloured sugar, cheese straws, italian almond cookies with just the right chewiness and fruitcake – and not the dry store bought kind … the kind that requires soaking the fruit two months in advance and a careful “rumming” process that happens every two nights once the cake is revealed for the season.

For our main meals, we did have a traditional Christmas dinner, complete with a turkey roasted to perfection by mom and all the trimmings … but our holiday season also included a few unorthodox picks. Very good ethiopian takeout one evening which was so plentiful it lasted us three days and a lovely mediterranean fish stew, the recipe for which was discovered on the back of a frozen package of fish!

Well, the magic of Christmas has once again come and gone in a delicious blur, but here are some photos which help fill in the details and capture the good memories.

Now onwards to a new year, filled with new food and adventures!