Christmas Goodies

We finally delivered some Christmas treats to a select few of our neighbors. Okay, so nine of our neighbours which is about half as many as I had originally planned for. Perhaps we'll make more cookies tomorrow. I just haven't been feeling up to it this week.

This happened last year, too, only I was pregnant and didn't feel up to it. Karen gave us the cookies. She gave us the bags. She gave us the ribbon. She gave us preprinted labels. All we had to do was deliver and I'm not sure we even finished doing that because Andrew found a fortune cookie about a week ago...and ate it.

This year, Karen gave us some Chinese take-out boxes and we filled them with treats of our own. We're trying to get more independent, see? We might eventually get there.

Well, we were out delivering these treats--with our blue and orange ribbon (very Christmasy, I know) because we couldn't find red, green, or gold anywhere--and we got stuck behind a car going about 10 MPH. We followed it semi-patiently for about three minutes until it turned off onto a side street. We breathed our sigh of relief and continued straight...

Only to be almost broadsided by that very same car! The driver pulled a "u-turn" of sorts in the side street and was coming straight for us! Andrew honked his horn and got out of the driver's way. Crisis averted. The driver, a young teenaged girl on her cellphone, slammed on her breaks and started waving her hands in front of her face. I'm quite sure she was trying not to cry.

We drove on but she stayed parked for a while. I think she was pretty shaken up--we weren't terribly calm ourselves. Two minutes after our near-collision, when we were just seconds away from our destination, Andrew said,

"Man, I think I'm having an adrenaline rush. I just want to honk at someone else! Someone needs to try to kill us again--I'm all ready!"

And with a quick "That's nice, dear," from me, I delivered the last of today's packages and we headed to Macey's to buy some more spices.

See, we forgot our list at home when we struck out for our grocery shopping trip yesterday. That means that we kind of made up what we needed spur of the moment while looking at our wiki at Andrew's parent's house. We forgot a number of spices that we never use, except that we wanted to use them for Christmas baking.

Allspice
Seasoned salt
Whole ginger
Onion powder

You know, things for wassail and chex mix--festive things like that. We tried making our own seasoned salt because we have this spice rack that we got for our wedding that has a bunch of bizarre spices that we have no clue what to do with. Seasoned salt apparently uses a lot of the spices we don't know what to do with. Celery seeds--who uses those? Apparently those are called for in seasoned salt.

Our attempt at seasoned salt was a little meager. We were missing quite a few of the many spices that it called for--it even asked fur curry, which itself is a mixture of a bunch of different spices, and we had run out of that already. We gave up when it told us to grind the stuff together and we didn't have anything that we thought would do that. I tried mashing it between two bowls, trying to simulate a pestle of sorts. We had to give up.

We bought seasoned salt and brought it home. Lo and behold it smelled the same as my own little concoction...but it didn't quite look the same. Ah, well. Our Chex Mix was wonderful with the store bought seasoned salt and our wassail was absolutely fabulous.

Our house now officially smells like Christmas!