Christmas Treat Wrap-Up

I know we're all sick of desserts and rich foods by now, sort of, and we've sworn to turn over a new leaf this new year. But I promised you a rundown of delivered holiday sweets and a rundown you'll get. With a warning: part of this post will make you mad. Really mad.

Here's what happened: as promised, I faithfully took pictures of each and every delivered-with-love treat. I took the photo in the same spot with the same camera lens each time so as to be fair to everyone. Then if you'll remember from my Muppet Glam post, I had a camera problem. It kept flashing "error" and I called my husband who casually said "well did you try reformatting the memory card"? And I got off the phone and learned how to reformat the memory card by myself. It didn't fix the problem but it did erase all my precious photos from the past 10 to 12 days. Baked goods, kids, a Christmas card expose, loving memories- all gone.

Yes, I've been angry and hurt, but let's make the most of the little we have. First let me say that I appreciated each and every delicious sweet delivered to our family. I marveled at the care put into every plate/box/bowl/sack.This was my first delivery. I was not prepared yet, so the kids got to the cookies before I could snap an untouched photo. There were 3 variety of cookies and they were arranged very nicely. The cookies were freshly baked but not homemade. I'm pretty sure Otis Spunkmeyer made the dough. The paper plate and foil cover thrilled me. I was suppose to make 3 plates of cookies and spread the 'Spirit of Christmas' around. I had mild intentions of doing so but I never did. I already had enough treats to deliver and didn't add in 3 more that I wouldn't get credit for. That's the spirit!

This pumpkin roll was Perfect, tasted so good. Even Dora thought so.

A non-sweet treat delivery. I stole Davy's notepad for to-do lists. The bell attached to the pipe cleaner was Whitman's favorite Christmas toy.

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Then here is where everything goes black. Empty. Like in New Moon when Edward leaves. The photos of short bread and glazed sugar cookies and bags of toffee and cheesecake cups and chocolate covered pretzels-gone.

Also sad, you're missing what I delivered during this time period. I kept it simple: sacks of cookies. Of course I dressed them up! The sacks had a window and there was ribbon and vintage tags involved. The cookies were either molasses (for the humble) or chocolate cherry chip (for the rich).

Then just days before Christmas I really got serious and planned a Day of Baking. I thought I would make it easier and not make sugar cookies. Yes, they are amazingly delicous but they take soo long to make and frost! So I thought gingerbread would be a little faster, plus I found these stunning gingerbread house treat boxes. What would be cuter than opening it to find your family made into gingerbread cookies?! Well I was a fool. Gingerbread cookies were not faster: the dough was hard to work with and I felt pressure to make each cookie look like the person it represented. Which failed. And they didn't taste as good as sugar cookies. Some people received gingerbread families and others received gingerbread sheep with candy cane brownies.

This is the Garrity family in Gingerbread.

Now here is where I started to loose it: the packing of all these treats took hours. Over 3 frantic, ignore the children hours. It shouldn't have, I thought I kept it simple, but it did. No two boxes were the same, each having slight variations in either the box or the quantity of cookies or the ribbons. Don't ask me why I couldn't just come up with an assembly line method. Like I said, I was frantic. It was a sunny day and I had planned on having my sweet smiling children deliver the boxes to our beloved friends in the afternoon.

Example of delivered box.

This was the contents for a small family, 2 adults and 1 toddler = 4 brownies and 4 ginger sheep. Please don't say they look like porcupines.

As I drove around in the now dark with my car loaded full of 9 treat boxes and 3 unhappy children, my emotions ranged from the satisfied feeling of having completed such a large task and anger at what you all made me do. Yes you, all of you. I felt the pressure and it consumed me the days before Christmas. And I looked terrible.

A couple of days after Christmas it snowed here. Caught up in the romanticism of winter, I starting rolling out sugar cookie dough into the shapes of snowflakes and mittens and caps. So you see, I do this to myself. Like the victim returning to the abuser, I'm asking for it. And I loved Christmas this year.