First Batch of Christmas Cookies

We enjoyed a peaceful, although busy, weekend at home.  Friday night we headed out for our Christmas tree hunt trying to find the perfect tree with good sturdy branches, since so many of our ornaments seem to be incredibly heavy, the right size, and the right price.  We settled on a Frazier fir - in case you were curious.  Then it was home to get the tree off the car and into the house.  We decided to try a new location this year putting the tree in the family room so we get to see it a bit more since we spend more time in there than the living room.

Saturday after our morning workouts, we spent a little time in the morning decorating the house and tree.  Part of our house decorating is to put out our small army of Danish Christmas people.  We started this collection with just one and have only added one or two a year, but over 30 some years the collection has really grown - to the point where we struggled to find a place for them.  We had to stop our decorating to focus on doing some cooking/baking.  Jo made home-made spaghetti and meatballs while I whipped up some cornbread and banana bread.  We then turned to the most important event of the holiday season, making the first batch of Christmas cookies.  This year the honor went to my grandmother's (or great-grandmother's, I've sort of lost track) cut-out cookies.  This brought back memories of being in the kitchen with my siblings and Mom as she patiently dealt with us each wanting to select the right cookie cutter and press it into the exact middle of the dough while I'm sure she was trying to get the cookies all made in less than 8 hours.  One nice thing now, is that I'm in charge of icing them, so the icing to cookie ratio has gone way up.  We then headed out for a walk since the weather was so warm before settling into our delicious spaghetti dinner.

Our evening was filled with watching the exciting Badger football game as the won over Nebraska (sorry to the Nebraska side of the family, but yeah for the Wisconsin side).  We went to bed that night exhausted from being on our feet all day, but happy to have the Rose Bowl game enjoy watching on New Year's Day.

Sunday we decided to take advantage of the warm weather and walked down to North Street for brunch (about 1.5 miles, one way) while discussing our holiday plans, part of which included discussing should we be plan on going to the Rose Bowl.  It is amazing to be out walking in December in Wisconsin not wearing any jacket.  After brunch, we put on the Packer's game while we trimmed out the tree doing our usual reminiscing about where we got each of our ornaments.  The tree when all finished looked great in its new location and we decided to put up our artificial tree in the living room so we have a tree in each now.  We then enjoyed chili for dinner with the aforementioned cornbread before turning in for another week of work.