Cookies for Santa, and more (Celebration #24)

Oh my goodness! Christmas is tomorrow! How did that even happen? This month really just flew around here.

Today was a pretty epic day of tying up loose ends/prepping for Christmas. I don't know how we could possibly have had so much stuff left to do, but we did. Well, there were chores to be done (can anyone celebrate if their house is dirty? if the carpet crunches when you walk across it, that's not so festive!) mostly, some food stuff for tomorrow to be prepped (we are going to have a nice dinner even though it will just be the 3 of us, AND a special treat for breakfast... then we're all gonna fast til Easter), presents to be wrapped (most were already done), stockings to be hung, cookies to be baked for Santa, guinea pig house to be cleaned, etc.

Oh, and we took breaks in there to go for coffee date (Emperor and me) and to watch the Black Adder Christmas special (all three of us.)

Phew.



Our specific celebratory activity was making gingerbread cookies to leave out for Santa. And to eat ourselves. The Emperor may be a little kid but he's sharp enough to know that one should always save a couple of cookies to enjoy oneself, ahem.

We used the gingerbread cut-out cookies recipe from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. They're good, but as you can see, they turned out very pasty for gingerbread. They're just not as molasses-y as some gingerbread, and I missed that in both the flavor and the color. They were very easy to roll out though, so maybe that's the tradeoff.

Here are the ones we left out for Santa:



Well, there were a couple more initially, but you know how it goes...



Remember our Christmas Door? It's pretty much full now! The stockings are a sham, though-- I didn't get around to stitching the other halves on after the felt-glue debacle. That's okay, they're pretty anyhow.



For Christmas, our ancient gentleman guinea pig Pingpong got a bath. And I got guinea pig snuggles. He has become so peaceful and huggy in his old age... sweet enough for me to overcome the wet guinea pig smell. (Which is worse BY FAR than wet dog could ever be.) I cuddled him and fed him orange slices and we had a grand old time.

Last but not least, here's your Emperor picture! This was after he cut out his first two gingerbread men. He was saying "Can I EAT them?" while I took this picture:



Merry Christmas! I hope that wherever you are and whatever you're doing tomorrow, you get some of the ideal parts of the holidays: some sweet time with family and/or friends, a nice present, something good to eat, something like that. And may you have very little of the tedious stuff (family drama, cranky people at the grocery store, stuff like that).