Dazzling holiday lights

When My Awesome Parents told us they were coming for New Year's, I bought us tickets to Dazzling Nights Pittsburgh at the Pittsburgh Botanical Garden. Dear Husband and I have regularly attended the holiday flower and light show at the Phipps Botanical Garden, but I wanted to do something different. A company comes in to set up forests of lights along the pathways. It was an impressive variety of strings, rings, flowers, rods, arches, Christmas trees, and other shapes. There were natural trees illuminated in neon lights, a fairy forest of dancing pinpoints of lights, and a cathedral of candles and stained-glass windows. Everything was even more magical because of a full moon overhead and snow on the ground, softening the landscape and crunching under foot. I just didn't anticipate that it was going to be 20 freaking degrees Fahrenheit. We made it 2/3 through the park before deciding our fingers were icicles, and we had seen enough. Inside was an exhibit of quilts by Black artists, but nothing in the gift shop enticed us enough to be purchased.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Miracle on 34th Street, Hon!

One day we all gathered at my brother’s house for brunch, games, and presents. It was really nice to have the kids’ (almost) undivided attention for a Nerf battle, Chinese checkers, and Don't Bee Last (which I wasn't very good at). We also saw the beginning of Red One, the new Santa action movie (yes, you read that right).

In the evening, we went out to Everyman Theater, which shrewdly seemed to be the only company in town putting on entertainment between the holidays. We saw an excellent production of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, a sort of “locked-room” whodunit based loosely on a fairly racist children’s rhyme. While movies today come with lots of slick special effects, it's always exciting to see stage magic happen in person.

On the way home, Dad, Dear Husband, and I stopped by the 700 block of 34^th Street in Hamden to take in the 77th year of spectacular holiday lights! The lights are on from 6pm-10pm Sunday through Thursday and until midnight on Friday and Saturday from November 30-January 1. To manage the crowds, they block off vehicular traffic and invite vendors, Santa, and caroling groups. We might have stayed longer, but it was starting to rain.

Happy Holidays Hon!

Flock Party

Merry Grinchmas

Happy New Year

It's hard to see, but this is a train garden under the front porch.

Hannukah lights!

Christmas 2023

Editor's Note: If you're following along in real time, this post is dropping one month after the big event due to general busyness of mixing family/friend time with a half-week of work over the holidays, followed by jumping into the new semester with both feet. Also, I was waiting for my new storage items to arrive in the mail, and I wanted to show them to you, because this post is dedicated to the suburban wife I have become. Cheers!

Dear Husband and I had a lovely Christmas 2023, in part because for the first(!?) time in two decades, we did not travel. Instead, his immediate family came to us. Unsurprisingly, I made very ambitious plans for cooking and activities, beginning with a great new taco place. Christmas Eve breakfast was waffles with a warm, homemade cinnamon pear compote topped with walnuts and powdered sugar that looked like something from a Williams Sonoma catalogue, but I was too busy serving and eating to photograph it.

(Moravian star visible in front window.)

(Yes, that is a flock of flamingoes; alas, their days may be numbered--

they really should have flown south for the winter, as snow and ice do not agree with them.)

Since buying our house almost 2 years ago, we have been purchasing more Christmas decorations. Last year was a reusable wreath with matching garland for the light pole in the front, and a sparkly light-up deer for the back. This year I discovered "urn fillers" for the concrete containers on either side of the driveway and scoured the internet to find a set that DH liked with battery-operated timers that didn't require a second mortgage. (Our first picks cost $170! EACH!) I also leaned into some kind of country kitsch with two oversized black metal lanterns with battery-operated candles to hang in the back yard--for ambience? DH seems to like them.

For Christmas Eve lunch (DH would already be at church by dinnertime), I decided to re-create that phyllo pie recipe. This time I made chickpea-with-spinach and chicken-(leftover from chicken soup)-with-peas, served with homemade cranberry sauce and my in-laws' German cucumber salad. Demerits for forgetting to defrost the frozen dough sheets overnight, although it turns out you can nuke them in their plastic wrappers in the microwave for 60 seconds (thanks, Alan Brown!).

Christmas Day breakfast was cinnamon rolls with grapefruit. More demerits to me for hustling us out of the house at 9am to be early for the 10am service at St. Paul's Cathedral, when actually we wanted to attend the noon service with the special music that started at 11:30am (whoops). So we gave up our spot in the parking lot and drove across town to Homewood Cemetery, where we hunted for the grave of a distant relative, then dawdled over hot drinks from the Starbucks that was open in the Jewish neighborhood. It felt so nice to give ourselves the gift of "no stress." (Kudos AND TIPS to the baristas who were working hard!) We were in good time for the brass, choir, and organ music and came home to a late lunch of phyllo pie with my MIL's raspberry pie for dessert.

There was jigsaw-puzzling, various rounds of card games, and we visited the large train set that is up in the living room of the older couple next door. The husband grew up in our house, and that train set used to be in what is now our living room.

Christmas Day dinner was London broil with this excellent marinade (not shown), mashed potatoes with my in-law's mushroom gravy, and Brussels sprouts that I thought would continue to cook while they rested on the stovetop but didn't (whoops).

On Boxing Day I took two meals off and only cooked for dinner, since DH's brother had come to town. I made this Martha Stewart "Cajun shrimp" recipe (above), except I swapped out the Andouille sausage for water chestnuts to lower the salt and fat content for my FIL, and I skipped the celery altogether, since only my MIL and I like it. I also tossed in the green pepper chunks last so they would stay crunchy. Served with roasted carrots and cumin. This filled our stomachs before we headed out to the Holiday Lights at the Phipps Botanical Garden.

Finally, this year I tired of storing our ornaments in torn, decades-old tissue paper and a mish-mash of cardboard boxes, so I invested in a set of plastic tubs and red-and-green canvas storage containers with cardboard inserts. Here you can see Rosamunda "helping" me sort everything into their new containers. There's a little space to grow, but we have more than enough ornaments to fit on a standard-issue live fir tree, so it's mostly about being able to see what you're looking for when you're decorating and feeling neat and tidy when everything is put away. 

Eggnog Pie and Glitter in Your Eye

 

I have never been much of an eggnog fan, but because I like creative baked goods to change up my breakfast routine, I was intrigued by references on social media to eggnog pie. I waited until Dear Husband acquired his annual half gallon of the stuff, and then when he realized it was going to expire faster than he could drink it, I discovered that this pudding pie is surprisingly easy to make:

1 1/2 cups of your favorite eggnog

1 cup of heavy cream or 2 cups of whipped topping

3.4oz package of INSTANT vanilla pudding

1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg

Graham cracker pie crust

Before

Mix the eggnog, pudding mix, and nutmeg together until thick (5 minutes).

Whip the cream if necessary (stiff peaks! turn the bowl upside down over your head!).

Then fold the latter into the former.

Pour into pie crust, make the top look pretty with your spatula, then chill for 3 hours. 

During

Here are some photos of our Christmas decorations. We compromised on a wreath and garland with two types of greenery and pine cones for contrast but no glitter or fake snow.

(Yet the light-up reindeer in the backyard DOES have glitter, and where it was unboxed in the garage still looks like a unicorn massacre scene.)

Dear Husband wants to extend the icicle lights across the front of the roofline, but we'll have to figure out how to plug everything in and THEN how to hold up the lights, as currently someone has to leave the house and go around the corner to un/plug the outside lights; there's another outdoor outlet on the other side of the house, but it's behind a bush. It may be easier to wrap a strand of lights around the light pole.

After

Serve with an extra dash of nutmeg and/or cinnamon! It's just the right consistency, creamy, with a little tang as an aftertaste. I have been pairing a slice with a dark tea (like Irish Breakfast or Cinnamon Rooibos) and a little fruit (clementines, grapes) for breakfast.