Christmas

I'll admit it, I am wiped out. But I got the cards out, the decorations up, the gifts wrapped and 8 varieties of cookies baked. I got the house cleaned and 2 casseroles and pies and a ham made for Christmas dinner. My sister and her family came over for dinner, as did my mother, and we had a wonderful time.

I am soooo wiped out. I would love to vegetate today, but the laundry was piling up and jars of cream were taking up too much space in the fridge, so I had to wash a couple of loads and make butter.

Here are a few photos to share with you:

These are the gingerbread hands that I made for the children's stockings.

The kids, all cleaned up for Mass.
The tree, looking pretty good, even after Dominic knocked it over.
And here are a few of my favorite ornaments (I have so many favorites, most of them hand-sculpted and painted by my sister, but I could spend hours trying to photograph them and get them uploaded):

Here is Puss In Boots, made by my sister,

Here is one from my childhood in Germany, the Holy Family in a nutshell,

A very old, tiny nutcracker, with a functional jaw,

And a fairy-baby I made, complete with real butterfly wings. Click on it for a larger image.

I hope everyone had as pleasant a Christmas Day as we had. Now that the Big Day is done, I'm going to try to enjoy the other 11 days of Christmas in a slightly more relaxed manner!

Tools for the serious cookie-baker

I rarely bake cookies during the year. Maybe two or three times, if that. Usually I would rather bake breads--yeast breads, sourdough breads, sweet breads like banana or pumpkin. Una will bake brownies or muffins now and then. But I save my cookie-baking energy for Advent.

I don't bake sugar cookies at this time of year. No, I roll up my sleeves, tie on my apron and let my German blood take control of my body. I do fancy little things, dipped in chocolate, rolled in crushed nuts, spiked with Asbach Uralt. I reached the apex of this baking insanity in Charlotte, NC, the year before I had Una. I baked over a thousand cookies, twelve varieties in all, and gave them to all the neighbors, to friends and to the mailman.

Well, I won't be doing that this year. I have a mere seven varieties planned for this year (two already baked and the dough for four others in the freezer), and Una will bake Chocolate Walnut Toffee Bars. Over the years I have gathered tools that make all this baking a breeze:

1) The Queen Appliance of my kitchen, the KitchenAid Mixer. I love this thing. I got the big, 6-quart model with the metal attachments and it will knead even my very stiff sourdough rye. I
hate it when the baby cries and you're up to your elbows in bread dough...
2) This is new, and I love the way it works. It is called the Beater Blade (www.beaterblade.com), and it eliminates the need to stop and scrape down your batter or cookie dough. I have used it with cheesecake batter (where I usually have to stop frequently and scrape down the sides of the bowl to prevent lumps of cream cheese from remaining in the batter), and it really works. It isn't cheap (probably because it is new), but it comes in two sizes and fits all the major brands of standing mixers.
3) I wouldn't even consider baking cookies without this stuff. I don't like greasing and re-greasing cookie sheets.
4) I got the 1-teaspoon scoop last year, and my sister got the two-teaspoon one for me as one of my birthday gifts in November. These are nifty. Scoop and drop, scoop and drop, and you have perfectly uniform little dough-balls on your baking sheet in no time. The bigger one is good for little kid-sized meatballs, too.5) Not a necessity by any means, but with limited counter space this triple-tiered cooling rack is nice to have. This one came from Aldi a few years back.
6) And if you do icing, these are nice to have and much easier for the kids to handle than a pastry bag. From the wedding/specialty baking section at Wal-Mart.

And that's that. I hope to post at least one of my favorite recipes over the next few days.

It's beginning to feel a lot like...Spring?

It got up to 71 degrees today. I opened the windows for the first time in ages, and although the ground was damp from days of rain, I pushed all the kids outside (actually, it took almost no prodding.) I was grateful for the time they had outdoors. I tend to lose my serenity around five kids with cabin fever, four of them boys who will literally climb the walls when they have excess energy to burn.

I'm glad they enjoyed it. By Sunday the expected high temperature will be 31 degrees, and the low 13 degrees.

It's butter twice a week now...

Nuala is giving us cream! At least a quart to every gallon, but I only skim off about 3 cups and leave a bit on the milk. It's so nice. Our last cow, Matilda, was a "low-cal" cow and never had more than an inch or two of cream on the milk. The kids love as a treat a small dish of thick top-cream with sugar on it, even when there is no summer fruit with which to eat it. Makes me feel rich.

I'm still here

Sorry about keeping away from this ol' blog. I just am trying to catch up with everything. Here's the update: cards are all out but for four or five local ones; gifts are wrapped but for tags and ribbons. Tree is outside awaiting trimming by Bret. Will be working on cookies from now until Monday in all likelihood. Bathrooms and floors are a disaster, but will have to stay like that until Wednesday. School? Well, let' just say we are concentrating on religion, crafts and "life skills" for now...

Thank God that there are twelve days of Christmas! I would hate to get this worked up in anticipation of just one single day! We live in the south, where most folks put the tree up the day after Thanksgiving and take it down on the 26th (by which time, if it is a real tree, it will be without needles, having left them in a trail from the livingroom to the sidewalk). We get ours up usually a few days before Christmas, but then it stays up often beyond Epiphany (my German mother swears the Christmas season officially ends on the Purification of Mary, but I won't keep the tree up that long!).

An update...and stuff that is on my mind

And cluttering my brain.

First of all, Bret is doing much better. He will have to have a follow-up CT scan to make sure that something they saw in his lung was indeed pneumonia (prayers requested here, friends), but he hasn't been coughing much at all, and he really appears to be on the mend. By the way, I really recommend homeopathic belladonna for fever. I used it twice, and both times the fever left him for the rest of the night. I was amazed.

I am so behind in everything this year. Usually I try to be done with shopping by the end of October (I usually still have a few things to get in November, but the major shopping is done), I spend November cutting paper snowflakes with the kids, freezing batches of cookie dough and writing Christmas cards. I take a photo or photos of the kids to include with said cards. In December I finish the cards, wrap the gifts and bake the cookies.

Not this year. I have indeed finished shopping, and I have 4 batches of cookie dough frozen. I have no photo of the kids and only half the cards are out. The kids have done a few snowflakes and not a single thing is wrapped. I don't like it like this. I'm a list-maker and scheduler by nature and "spontaneous" is not a word used to describe me. The very idea of something like "unschooling" makes me queasy. I think one of the things that attracts me so much to my Catholic faith is the liturgical year--it is the very essence of order, and the same goes for the Latin Mass: no dilly-dallying with the rubrics! So all this craziness only 10 days from Christmas is making me crazy.

So I have to go now. I have snowflakes to cut and cards to write. Ciao!

It's always something, isn't it?

My dear husband was terribly ill last night. He has had a cold (caught from the kids) for about a week. It doesn't help that before leaving at 6 a.m. for his cabinet-shop job he is out in all kinds of weather feeding the animals and milking the cow. Last night after dinner he started to feel cold and couldn't warm up. He took a couple of acetominophen feeling that he was getting a temperature. I gave him some tea, which helped warm him up a bit and got him through our family Rosary, but afterward his teeth were chattering again. We got everyone to bed, and he crawled under the down comforter with a heating pad.

The acetominophen, two hours later, hadn't done much. He got a full-fledged fever, over 103 degrees. I prayed to the Blessed Mother and St. Raphael, and gave him a dose of homeopathic belladona (for fevers, especially those with a sudden onset). And I went to bed, still praying.

God is good. Whenever I woke up last night I would touch his head, and it was cool. I'm hoping that he'll have the good sense to stay home from work today even if the fever is gone, but men can be pretty hard-headed.

I may have to turn Nuala out with her calf to nurse her...I don't know that I could handle the milking. The surge milker we have is heavy enough empty, and it's been over a year since Bret gave me a lesson in using it. I could milk by hand, but I may be out in the barn for hours...

I need some of my boys to get big and strong in a hurry!

Ugly weather

I am happy to report that Una's mouth is once again in fine form, although minus a tooth. The offending tooth was a baby tooth, already loose, but the root was not dissolving as it ought to have and that was causing the pain. The dentist removed it and all has been well since.

We are having really ugly weather. Yesterday was windy and rainy and cold. Not pleasant. And I was too tired to engage the kids in creative pursuits after school, so they watched videos through the better part of the afternoon. I am lees fond of winter than I was before having children. A bunch of kids with cabin fever is no fun, especially a house full of young boys!

On a brighter note, I made butter for the first time since last summer. The calf is off of Nuala now, so she no longer holds back the cream. And we have gallons that are one-third cream. Luxury.

The Feast of the Immaculate Conception

"At length, on the distant horizon, rises, with a soft and radiant light, the aurora of the Sun which has been so long desired. The happy Mother of the Messias was to be born before the Messias Himself; and this is the day of the Conception of Mary. The earth already possesses a first pledge of the divine mercy; the Son of Man is near at hand Two true Israelites, Joachim and Anne, noble branches of the family of David, find their union, after a long barrenness, made fruitful by the divine omnipotence. Glory be to God, who has been mindful of His promises, and who deigns to announce, from the high heavens, the end of the deluge of iniquity, by sending upon the earth the sweet white dove that bears the tidings of peace." --Dom Gueranger, OSB, The Liturgical Year

Urgent--Please sign C-FAM's petition

The Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute is sponsoring an important petition. On December 10th, pro-abortion groups will present petitions asking the United Nations General Assembly to make abortion a universally recognized human right. C-FAM's alternate petition calls for government to interpret the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as protecting the unborn child from abortion. They need at least 100,000 signatures by December 10th, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Please go to their website and sign the petition.

And most of all, pray.

Helplessness

My Una has an awful toothache. Tylenol hasn't helped, half a tablet of Tylenol 3 only gave her a heavy head, homeopathic remedies haven't helped, and she gets only short-term moderate relief from heat packs and clove oil. O, stabat mater, how awful it is to have to stand by helplessly and watch a child suffer. How dreadful it is when she turns to me with tears in her eyes and says, "Mama, my tooth hurts," knowing that I have done all I can but somehow hoping that I can ease her pain. I stroke her hair, rub her feet and say, "I know it hurts. You'll get through this. Offer your pain for someone who is in danger of losing his or her soul."

Why do these things always happen on the weekend?

Saint Nicholas came!

And he brought the children the usual gifts of tangerines, nuts and sweets. Gabriel, as usual, was the first up to peek into the schoolroom and look at the bench where the boots, cleaned in hopeful preparation for St. Nick's visit, were lined up. He was soon followed by Una and Sebastian. The littlest ones are still asleep as I write this.
We are especially eager for Adrian to awaken, as Doll must have hitched a ride home with St. Nicholas last night and is out by Adrian's boot sporting a gnome cap and carrying a fishing pole:
The only sad thing is that my St. Nicholas boots couldn't be given to the children. Depite their good looks, my oven did a number on them (I baked them Wednesday) and they were rather burnt on the bottoms and didn't rise properly. Better luck next year, I hope...

I'm gonna cry...

Here I am, at the height of the baking season, and my oven has just died. It has been going for a long time...the digital display wouldn't light up, the temperature knob was broken off and I have been using needle-nosed pliers for two years to turn it on and off, and the thermostat was off by about 100 degrees. But now it cannot be turned on at all without going up to 500 degrees.

This is not good timing. Christmas expenses aside (which we keep moderate), we bought a tractor this summer, we just replaced our crashed computer a few months ago, and our considerable property taxes are due in the new year.

Okay, Blessed Mother, it's not my money, it's yours. Now ask St. Joseph to find me a good deal on a new oven, and please, be quick about it!!

It's been a busy week

Busy, but not too bad, really. We have been starting school on time this week, and that makes a huge difference! We actually get all the core subjects done by lunch, and that makes the rest of the day much more pleasant.

The kids are taking turns opening the doors on the German Advent calender every morning after breakfast. I used to get them each their own calender, but the cost was getting to be too much, so my solution is for them to take turns, and to make the event sweeter for those who cannot open a door, I give all the kids a Hershey's Kiss after the door is opened. So everyone is happy.

A great boon to the household has been this: it is a miniature mailbox I purchased on sale from Hearthsong, and it was well worth every penny. The children and I have been sending one another miniature letters and cards, from ourselves and from various dolls and stuffed animals. We have "mail-call" after school, and the kids are very eager to see if they have received something. This morning I have written Adrian a note "from Dolly", who has been missing for nearly two weeks now. He/she/it is somewhere in the house, as we don't allow Adrian to take Dolly out, but we can't seem to figure out where. So Dolly is on a fishing trip with gnomes on Magic Mountain.

And we have been cutting out paper snowflakes, with which we decorate our windows every winter.

I am working on my knitting as well. I am hoping to get beyond just the basics and learn to do socks and mittens and stuff.

And I am trying to get some cookie dough into the freezer for the week before Christmas...that's my baking and decorating week. The kids usually have no school so that I may go about like a madwoman dashing off last minute cards and baking up a storm.

Gabriel's Sixth Birthday

Gabriel Elias turned six yesterday, on the feast of St. Andrew. He received a special blessing from Fr. Shannon Collins, CPM, who baptized him on the feast of the Immaculate Conception six years ago.

He was our first baby born in Tennessee, and on the night he was born we had a blessed candle burning, a number of people praying and Rachmaninoff's Vespers playing. And my midwife was two hours away in eastern TN on her way to another laboring mom. She had high hopes of making it back in time for Gabe's birth, but Bret and I knew better. I have pretty quick labors. "She's going to miss the whole thing," Bret and I agreed.

She did miss it. In fact, she missed the other baby's birth as well. Gabe was out in three pushes and his papa caught him. It was about 1:30 in the morning on the 30th of November, 2002. Within a short time, he was surrounded by his Oma, his aunt and future uncle and his big brother (who was awakened by all the commotion). And the midwife and her assistant, eventually!

Gabriel was my "happy baby", and remains the phlegmatic of the family. He is the easy-going guy who goes along with his siblings' whims just to be agreeable. He is usually the first of them to rise in the morning, and the easiest to get to bed (even as a toddler he would take himself to bed when tired). He was the baby happy to be held by anyone, and the only one I ever lost at Wal-Mart for a terrifying seven minutes.

I love you, puddin' cheeks!

Well, I guess it's about time...

...for the kids to get colds, that is. This is the first since, oh, Easter Monday I think, so I can't complain too much. The toddlers are extremely snotty and messy, Gabriel isn't too bad, although he certainly has a cold, and Una is blowing her nose a lot and is pretty grouchy to boot. Nevertheless, we got through school with relative ease today. Probably because it is review and test time here and I can't say that the tests are too challenging.

Sebastian alone is showing no sign of illness, which is typical of him. He seems to have a killer-immune system and gets only one out of every 4 or 5 colds go through this household.

Oh, well...at least they weren't sick during the Thanksgiving weekend. And I'm thankful for that.