J-man today

 

 

Walking and dancing….

He is walking and dancing by himself…mostly.

I didn’t get out snowboarding, but we did get out

Rain, there is a chalet with your name on it, waiting for you in Switzerland. No, really

Escher Swiss Chalet

Happy 2012 from Miege, Switzerland (Crans Montana)

 

Happy 2012 from Crans Montana

Molasses cookies, my new holiday tradition

I am not really a traditional holiday person. In fact, I mainly try to avoid tradition all together. My mum, on the other hand, has a list a mile long of things she does at Christmas: Christmas letters, Christmas baking, decorating the house, decorating the tree, Christmas dinner (although, I am pretty sure my dad does most of that), buying gifts, making gifts, wrapping gifts, sending gifts… there is an awful lot of things to do at my parent’s house each December.

To get in the Christmas spirit, I tried posting my favourite Christmas carols on my blog. After the Pbbbttt story, I lagged.

A few days before Christmas, I tried baking. AND…it worked! Since I am not really a baker, I was excited when my Christmas cookies actually looked good enough to eat. (Thank you to my friend Karen who told me baking wasn’t an art, but a science and just to follow a recipe without making any adjustments.)

Molasses sugar cookies from allrecipes.com

I found the recipe on Allrecipies.com, but here it is for my virtual recipe book:

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups shortening
2 cups white sugar
1/2 cup molasses
2 eggs
4 cups all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon salt

Directions

Melt the shortening in a large pan on the stove, and cool.
Add sugar, eggs, and molasses, beat well.
In a separate bowl, sift dry ingredients together and add to the pan. Mix well and chill 3 hours or overnight.
Form into walnut-size balls. Roll in granulated sugar. Place on greased cookie sheet about 2 inches apart.
Bake at 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) for 8-10 minutes.
Store in an airtight container to keep from getting overly crisp. If they do lose their softness, an easy way to restore it is to place one slice of fresh bread in the container with the cookies for a couple of hours or overnight and they will be soft again!

Merry Christmas from Miege, Switzerland

 

Merry Christmas from Miege, Switzerland

All I want for Christmas….

I would be so cool.

 

We have to buy a Wii first, but still. How fun would dancing with ABBA be?

Cool. I’d be the coolest momma on the block.

On the eighth day of Christmas

Thanks to Kara for the link in Facebook. Justin Bieber, Michael Bublé, eat your hearts out.

On the seventh day of Christmas

Are you getting all kinds of traditional carols on the radio yet? My parents tell me there is a lot of snow in Whitehorse. It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas there at least.

Myself, I bought a string of coloured lights. My Christmas decoration investment for the year. I hung them up on the side of the window. In the morning, the J-man goes over to investigate and starts gnawing on them.

Today’s Christmas song is from one of my favourite all-time Christmas movies: Love Actually. I can’t seem to embed it, so you will have to listen to it over on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVSmT4nNEkQ. It’s when the young girl sings “All I Want for Christmas is You” at the school Christmas concert.

I could probably post a Mariah Carey version, but really, do all women in the music industry have to be naked and pole dance? I guess that is jsut a sign of me getting old. Yes, I think there is too much sex and nudity in the media. Old media. New media. Television. YouTube. Doesn’t matter. I originally liked the Love Actually version, I will link to that one.

Anyway, regardless of media and women 2011, here is a young lady who isn’t pole dancing.