Holidays – Page 12 – Thimbleanna

Teddy Rose

54 Comments / December 28, 2009 February 22, 2011 / Family, Holidays

Whew! Can you believe it’s all over for another year? Did all you Christmas peeps have a good holiday? It went too fast — it’s all a blur. If you’re really sad that it’s over, have no fear! Angel Jem has you covered with a countdown to next Christmas in her sidebar. (That cracked me up when I read it!)

As promised, Santa was very, very good to our family this year. And my young nephew cashed in big with this little beauty (being prepped for his big debut):

Isn’t he adorable? We all had so much fun playing with the new puppy on Christmas Day. After much debate, he’s been named Teddy Rose. It happened after someone suggested Theodore Roosevelt. He’s eight weeks of soft and cuddly and even has puppy breath. Too cute!

There’s just one little kink in the whole happy affair though — his big sisters, The Yappers.

The Yappers are none too happy about this new development. MyDadLovesMeBestSister thinks they’re afraid of him. There was lots of growling, yapping and shaking. Teddy is oblivious to the whole fear thing — he just wants some playmates!

It cracks me up that they’re afraid of him — he’s really not much bigger than they are. Good thing they’re meeting him now though — he’s a Goldendoodle, so he’s going to be big enough to sit on them if they get too yappy!

It briefly looked like there might be some sharing of toys, but it didn’t really last. Yapper 1 was just sniffing them for a minute, then she retreated. Hopefully, they’ll soon be fast friends.

This is my favorite picture of the day. Teddy was so funny — he’d play pretty hard and every hour or two, he’d just drop wherever he was and have a little snooze. This picture was taken by my cute niece – Santa was very, very good to her this year too.

We’re going to have lots of fun playing with cameras. We started by taking pictures of each other, taking pictures of each other (in very poor light!)

I hope you all had a good, happy Christmas like we did. And hopefully I’ll be back soon with gingerbread competition pictures (it was a tough voting year) — there’s new computing power in the house, and once TheManoftheHouse starts changing things over…well, hopefully we won’t be off-line for long! ;-)

XOXO,
Anna

Christmas Cookies

51 Comments / December 21, 2009 February 22, 2011 / Holidays, Recipes

Wow! Thanks for all the fun Christmas Top Ten lists. I had a great time reading through them all. I hope you are all enjoying your top ten and are well on your way to being ready for the big day!

It was a good weekend here in ThimbleannaLand. I had a good time in the kitchen and made my Christmas cookies. Here’s what the family will be snacking on this year:

Lemon Gems. Buttery and lemony — and cute!

Raisin Filled Pockets. I thought I was using the old family recipe this year, but it was different. They’re good, but they flattened out an awful lot.

Chocolate Caramel Delights. Chocolate and Caramel. I have nothing else to say.

Chocolate Dipped Shorbread. I used my fun little “cookie writer” that I previously blogged about here.

Grandma Hill’s Browned Butter Cookies. We’ve had them every year since I was a little girl. And we don’t always wait until Christmas to make them, ’cause we LOVE them.

Angel Slices. Our number one Christmas cookie. They go so fast, we have to make twice as many as the other cookies.

January is going to be extra painful this year. But, it will be SO worth it!

XOXO,
Anna

My Christmas Top Ten*

43 Comments / December 18, 2009 February 22, 2011 / Holidays

10. Hot Chocolate. Thanks to my sweet and fabulous friend Brigette, I can now make a great cup!

9. It’s a Wonderful Life. THE perfect Christmas movie. I cry every time. I hope they don’t make the Miracle on 34th Street mistake of trying a re-make – nothing can top Jimmy Stewart.

8. BIG, old-fashioned Christmas lights. Small and twinkly are pretty, but these are the real deal.

7. Cute, kitchsy stocking stuffers. Jingle bell bracelets were my favorite last year.

6. The Christmas Eve family sleep over with Christmassy pillow cases. All the characters in ThimbleannaLand over there on the sidebar (well, not the Quilty Peeps or Hester) celebrate our Christmas Eve by sleeping at whoever’s house is hosting Christmas (MeMum’s this year!) That way we all share the fun of Santa’s arrival (and rumor has it it’s going to be a good one this year.)

5. The Annual Gingerbread competition. I thought we wouldn’t be able to have it this year because it’s the in-law rotation for TheFirstChild and SweetiePie, but they’re going to pop in on the 23rd. SweetiePie was here two days ago (poor thing had to have a root canal!) and she helped cut and bake all the house pieces, so bring on this year’s competition! And just so you know, MyDadLovesMeBestSister told me last weekend (while I was slaving away on the ladder doing Christmas lights and she was lying around on her bum making fun of me) that SHE has a plan this year and SHE is going to win! (It’s not too late to make your own gingerbread houses — recipe and pattern can be found here.)

4. Holiday music playing while I’m decorating/baking/wrapping.

3. Grandma’s Christmas Bells. A wonderful piece of childhood, now living at our house.

2. Santa Claus. Santa. Claus. When I was a little girl, trying to sleep on Christmas Eve, I peeked out the window and saw his sleigh and reindeer on the neighbor’s roof. Then I heard the bells on our roof. And THEN, I had to squeeze my eyes shut and pretend to be sleeping because HE came to check on me — I saw that pretty white head of hair from my top bunk bed. I DID! Oh the magic!

and, my absolute, Numero Uno…

Christmas Cookies! Bake ’em! Eat ’em! Love ’em! They deserve a post all their own!

Ok, let ‘er rip — give me YOUR top 10!

XOXO,
Anna

*Not counting family, joy filled hearts, the reason for the season and all that other mushy stuff. ;-)

The Sugar Cookie Bake-Off

59 Comments / December 4, 2009 February 22, 2011 / Family, Holidays

Boy, thanks for all the Advent Calendar Love! I love this time of year — it’s so fun seeing what everyone is working on. There have been a ton of advent calendars online and it’s been very inspiring to see them all. I’m ready to make a new one!

This is also the time of year when all the Christmas goodies come out. We had so much fun in October when we had our Chili Cook-Off that we decided we should continue the tradition. This time, with Christmas so close, I thought it would be fun to try different cut-out sugar cookie recipes. MeMum has had a wonderful recipe that we’ve made every year since I’ve been a little girl, but I’ve seen so many other recipes out there and I’ve always wondered how they stack up.

The instructions were to come to the party with the dough already prepared. Then we would cut-out, bake and decorate all together. We had six different “teams”, therefore, six “recipes”.

Team 1: Moi. I tried the recipe from Cookie Craft with their royal icing recipe because their cookies are so pretty. Their recipe had no baking powder or baking soda which helped these cookies do the best job of maintaining their shape. With the royal icing, I suspected these cookies wouldn’t taste very good and I was right — cardboard has more flavor. Blech.

Team 2: MeMum. She used our tried and true recipe. It has a hint of lemon. She had a little trouble with the dough this year though.

Team 3: MyDadLovesMeBestSister. Her recipe contained cream cheese. I love cream cheese and I’ve always figured if a sugar cookie had cream cheese in it, you couldn’t go wrong.

Team 4: My nephew and TheFirstChild. They totally cheated and brought a roll of Pillsbury Sugar Cookies and canned frosting. Boys. Men!

Team 5: CrazyBIL. I think he got his recipe from his mom — it was for a soft sugar cookie. He had a little mishap, in that he added a little too much lemon to his frosting. I personally loved it, but it was too tart for most everyone else.

Team 6: My two nieces and SweetiePie. They tried a recipe containing buttermilk. Aren’t their cookies cute?

After the cookies were all made, I convinced everyone to have a blind taste test. They weren’t so sure, but I reasoned that you also taste with your eyes, so it was the only fair way. This part was lots of fun — you should have seen the faces when that sour lemon cookie hit their tongues!

So, who won? Well, in theory:

Gag Me.

I have two words: Chemical. Aftertaste. I think this cookie won because of the frosting. The rest of us pretty much fell down in the frosting department because we were concentrating on the cookie dough so much. MeMum’s cookie and the buttermilk cookie came screaming into second place. They both have great potential. I thought the cream cheese recipe was pretty disappointing. And way at the back of the pack were the lemon and cardboard cookies. Cardboard was dead last. Let that be a lesson to you — don’t judge a cookie by it’s cover.

Of course, now that the contest is over, I’ve seen several new recipes that I want to try, so there will be more experimenting. It’s just too bad they can’t all be tried at once! Oh, and we’ll be looking for more bake/cook-off ideas after the new year — any suggestions?

XOXO,
Anna

An Advent Calendar

73 Comments / November 30, 2009 February 22, 2011 / Holidays, Sewing

Whew! December is here. Can you believe it??? I have big plans for a relaxed holiday season this year. (Ha!) No last minute rushing around. I’m not really making any gifts this year (I might make one or two little things), so that will help. One thing I’ve always wanted to make is an advent calendar. TheManoftheHouse thinks it’s heresy to have anything other than those cute little German Advent calendars that have a piece of chocolate behind each door. That’s what we always had when the boys were little because I didn’t get my act together back then and make a homemade advent calendar. Since I don’t have much to make this year, I thought it would be a good year to finally make one.

Better late than never, and this way, I’ll be ready for Grandkids, right? I couldn’t decide if I wanted an advent calendar with little doors, or to just wrap up gifts and put numbers on them. I’m pretty sure I won’t go the gift route, but I do like the idea of having a little chocolate or an activity to do together in each pocket. So, I compromised on medium sized pockets so that I’ll have a little flexibility in the future.

I used Monica’s Pennie Pocket pattern — omitting the hanging tie and opting to fold over the back triangle in order to make a channel that will allow for hanging. Like the Valentine pockets I did in February, I used felt for the front flap and crocheted around the edges. I also embroidered the numbers on the flaps using my embroidery machine. I haven’t quite decided how I’ll want to hang them. I thought of several options…in rows on a wall,

strung along a fireplace or a window,

or running up our staircase. For this year, I think the staircase will win out.

Do you like the little numbers?

For those of you with embroidery machines who might like to make an advent calendar, I’ve packaged those 24 numbers into a downloadable zip file (the numbers would work on all sorts of advent calendars – even just plain little pockets). They’re currently only in .hus format — I don’t have the time or the software to convert all those numbers into all the different embroidery machine formats. Hopefully you have the software to convert to your format. And, as always, if you use them for anything, let me know — I’d love to see what you make!

XOXO,
Anna