christmas

john is sometimes given to flights of culinary fancy . . . and sometimes to flights of british fancy. both of these tend to have lovely results, but when the two combine, the journey can be... well... a journey.

john's latest "british cooking project" obsession was a traditional british christmas cake. in case you, dear reader, are not british, think fruit-cake covered in marzipan, covered in white icing. optionally, decorated with little handmade marzipan christmas-y things.

the ingredients for a christmas cake are long and strange, and include things like candied lemon peel, candied cherries and black treacle. in the beginning, john refused to believe me that such oddities might be found at the local (gourmet) supermarket, and so he special ordered each and every single one of them from amazon.com for $30. then he got impatient, checked out the supermarket, which lo-and-behold the supplied all of the these ingredients, plus additional necessities such as three different kinds of raisins, plus brandy, drambuie and cointreau. i'm guessing all that added up to about $100.

the first stage of the actual cooking process was to combine all these ingredients and bake the cake. john and ava started this project on thanksgiving weekend.

after that were a couple of weeks of periodically "feeding" the cake more doses of alcohol.

and, finally, yesterday the cake was declared ready for decorating. so, off john went to the supermarket for marzipan. it took four tubes of marzipan to cover the cake, for a total price of $28.

after the marzipan-ing, the cake was iced and then decorated with marzipan trees and snowman (by yours truly). then it got a lovely sprinkling of sparking snow sugar ($5), and finally the $163 christmas cake was complete.

anybody care to buy a $5 slice?

grandma came down to san francisco for a short visit and to pick up ava and take her home to the great white north! before they left, they made some beautiful stain glass cookie ornaments for our christmas tree.

shortly after christmas 2008, i bought some post-holiday sale gingerbread house cookie cutters. i had this grand vision of home baking gingerbread building blocks, and then hosting a gingerbread house making party. well . . . as it turns out, i never quite found the time for all that baking. i procrastinated and procrastinated and finally decided to pick up some gingerbread house kits from target and throw together a last minute after-school gingerbread fest.

it all started out pretty peacefully. all the houses were erected in no time, and the decorating began. all the kids sat nicely on their chairs, and spilled a minimum of candy on the floor. but . . . our ratio of 4 adults : 6 children meant that there were plenty of unsupervised moments during which little hands started shoving candy and icing into little mouths.

gingerbread decorating was supposed to be followed by pizza-eating. instead, it was followed by christmas tree inspecting, then mad couch bouncing, and then everybody wound up in wearing wearing weird outfits and tearing around the house like banshees.

the best part was that i realized how much we'd all grown as parents . . . for the most parts the parents stayed parked at the table, ate the pizza ourselves, finished our cocktails and listened for happy squeals turning sour. the kids responded by playing about as nicely together as i'd ever seen (albeit at a very high volume), and aside from a near disaster with ava's poster paints, didn't really cause any permanent damage to either themselves or the house!

since ava was leaving for canada on december 8th, we jumped on the traditional, american, "christmas starts the day after thanksgiving" bandwagon, and got our christmas tree in november. this also meant that we got our tree during a november warm streak, instead of usual december freezing cold streak. we wore t-shirts. crazy.

ava was must happier about the whole christmas tree scene than in previous years. i can't say that she was a whole lot more cooperative for the camera though!

back at home, i worked on the big tree, and ava had a blast decorating the $10 mini tree that we picked up just for her.

as john noted the other day, pretty much the only thing ava does NOT say "no!" to is "ava, go kiss the [whatever]". a useful feature for cute pictures. see the full thunder bay christmas album.

we arrived in thunder bay just in time for nightfall on christmas eve. after opening presents on christmas morning, ava made her first venture outside into the land of cold and snow. ava was much more enthused by snow this year. still, on our first venture out into the cold she requested that ducky come along too. she very rarely requests that ducky come on an outing anymore - i guess she was feeling a little apprehensive! of course, ducky had to get dressed properly for the occasion . .. just like ava . . . in hats, mitts and a coat. fortunately, the coat was long enough that it covered his feet, so she forgot to demand that ducky wear boots too!

this year has brought ava many new friends, but in her heart there remains a very special place for paulo, her very first friend.

and . . . i really hope that we still know paulo when he's in college, 'cause i suspect that his own parents are much too soft-hearted to properly take advantage of all the great blackmail material i've been accumulating.

we had a better experience at the christmas tree lot than last year. still, ava did look a little uncertain at first, and she wasn't always so keen on going in the "right" direction. i now understand that the "problem" with our local christmas tree lot is that it's too realistic. the trees are arranged such that they stand up very nice and tall, and there are some truly gigantic christmas trees. in ava's little eyes, it's just waaayyy too much like an actual (scary) forest.

we had to laugh when we looked at our christmas tree decorating pictures -as john put it - "those are last year's pictures!" however, while the pictures are indisputably similar, it was definitely a different experience for ava. she fully understood the whole concept of decorating the tree this year. she put the decorations on "all by myself", nicely spread out, and once they were on the tree - they stayed on the tree! ava's still a little ways away from being able to tie the little bows, but she had fun advising me on where to put them.

initially, our coastal california babe was not a fan of either snow or snow-clothes. ava's boots were particularly challenging for her. we were all transported back in time a few months, to an era in which the baby would suddenly appear lying on her face on the ground sobbing. fortunately, snow is very low abrasion, so no permanent damage was done.

by the end of her canadian visit, ava was getting used to her winter gear and enjoying the snow. she still looked like a big pink marshmallow though.

while we in thunder bay, grandma organized a traditional sleigh ride, way out in the country past a little town called kakabeka falls, where a little girl named cailin used to live. the day of the sleigh ride dawned dark, gloomy and raining in town. i called mark to finalize arrangements, assured him that it was not raining in the country, and as i hung up the phone it started to pour. the thunder bay natives rallied nonetheless, showing up with five kids and three umbrellas.

thankfully, the weather gods smiled and the rain turned to snow moments before we reached our destination. the sleigh ride was exactly as i remembered those in my childhood. the neighborhood bullies gleefully tossed the small children off the sleigh and into the snow, we stopped for a hot chocolate and cookies break and john built ava a snowman. more pics