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Merry Christmas!
Chatterbox: Chirp at Cricket
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas!
This is the place for anyone who needs to let all their Christmas excitment out, tell what you want for Christmas, share your favorite Christmas song, a Christmas recipe, or anything else having to do with Christmas! We can wish each other a merry Christmas when it's Christmas, and we can tell each other what we got! Have fun!
submitted by Leeli
(December 17, 2016 - 8:30 am)
(December 17, 2016 - 8:30 am)
Yes, I am so into the holiday spirit right now! It feels so magical. The food, the decorations, the music, the holiday outfits, the excitement...I love it. There's so much to talk about...hmmm, let me pick one at a time...neighborhood lights!
So I live in a mostly middle-class neighborhood, and I love it, and it feels like the best neighborhood in the world. :) I lived there my whole life. It's pretty big, and there are trees everywhere, covering the view of anything outside the neighborhood, so it feels like its own island. It has long streets that are nice to walk along. And around Christmastime, it really is magical. You'd think it wouldn't be so magical in snow-less Texas, but I promise you we have a pretty darn good Christmas. (Wow, that sounded Texan!)
So many people decorate their houses--our neighborhood goes all out. There's even a competition. Some houses look so extravagant, covered with lights and decorations. Lights hanging from trees, decorations on lawns, everything imaginable. And though like I said there's a competition, it's not much like that, it's not intense competition...more like people do as much as they can to get into the spirit, and for their house to look wonderful for themselves and/or others.
We don't get extremely serious with our house, but I think ours looks very pretty. It's a corner house, one story. It's lined with colored lights, and the chimney is wrapped in list. There are lights around the short pillars are white technically, though they look yellow-ish white. The trunks of the two big trees in our front are wrapped in those same kinds of lights. We have a snowman blowup that glows enough to be seen, and we have a little spirally green tree. And a wreath at our door. And a Christmas-winters flag thing stuck into the lawn. It may or may not sound extravagant to you, but it's a very tame house compared to many of the other ones!
Yesterday, when we drove home from seeing Rogue One last night, we drove around the north side of our neighborhood, (we decided our side, the south, had more lights) looking at the houses, listening to Christmas music on the radio. This is one of my favorite family Christmas things we do, and I really treasure those moments.
(December 17, 2016 - 1:47 pm)
Oh hey, I go to Texas for Christmas nearly every year! Pretty much all of my extended family lives over there and I love visiting it. Both of my parents grew up in Texas, so I suppose I technically am Texan, although I haven't lived there since I was eleven months old and none of us have an accent or anything. Maybe we'll see eachother! Who knows... :)
Merry Christmas to everyone, by the way! If you don't celebrate Christmas, have an extremely wonderful December 25th!
(December 17, 2016 - 4:30 pm)
That sounds really neat! I live in rural Kentucky, and nit a neighborhood, but there are houses spaced out along the road, and lots of them have lights, so it's really fun to look at them while driving along our road!
(December 17, 2016 - 4:49 pm)
FAVORITE CHRISTMAS RECIPE; Gingerbread cookies using the William-Sonoma gingerbread mix. William-Sonoma is a cooking store.
*snobbish accent* I consider myself a gingerbread critic, and these are the best I tasted.
(December 17, 2016 - 8:43 pm)
I AM SO EXCITED! One tradition that my family does is make a ton of Christmas cookies, on both sides. My dad has a sugar cookie recipe that we make a whole tub of every year, and give to everybody- teachers, neighbors, friends, garbage men, my sister and I's bus driver, and more- it's really cool. My mom's side makes a hodge podge of a lot of recipes- snowballs, peanut blossoms, buttermilk cookies, pecan sandies, Reese's squares, chocolate chip cookies, tassies, and monster cookies. We also dip pretzels and peanuts in chocolate, and make something we call TV mix (which is sort of like chex mix, but our own combination) We give a lot of this stuff away, and we're still eating Christmas cookies on Easter, usually! They're really fun to make.
We also do this thing where my dad takes my sister and I to the mall and lets us shop for gifts. I love doing that. There is a 'holiday market' that is set up on Saturdays near Christmastime- I look forward to that as well. They sell really cool stuff! We saw an crotched Elsa hat with a braid coming out of the back, a whole booth of honey products, snowmen and penguin decorations made of old horseshoes, and small, blue, bird earrings that were made of paper. (I was almost going to buy them because of my CB name)
I'm also going to Midnight Mass this year, which is exciting. I borrowed a book of 98 Christmas songs from my piano teacher, and have been playing them non stop all week. My favorite carols are The First Noel, O Come O Come Emmanuel, People Look East, Silver Bells, and Carol of the Bells.
Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! Happy Kwansa! Have a good holiday, everyone!
(December 17, 2016 - 10:38 pm)
Wow! That's very simalar to what we do at Christmas with our Gramma! She has this recipe that's like, a few generations old, and we make TONS of cookies! Except in this case, we keep most of them to ourselves ;-P we still have some from last Christmas!XD Also, we usually help our grandma on my mom's side with holiday baking, such as her chocolate pie, butterscotch pie, buckeye balls (those are really fun!) and more! I've been a busy, busy baker this past week, making things for people for Christmas gifts, and animals! Escpecially animals! XD my dog Abi won't leave my side, for fear she'll miss something falling to the ground! XD XD XD
@Owlgirl lol. XD I made a gingerbread dog treat recipe that tasted so good I added sugar and made some for people! XD
(December 18, 2016 - 8:40 am)
Yum! I'm making a gingerbread house either today or tomorrow. It's from a kit. Some years it looks better than others, but it's always fun. I usually eat too much frosting XD
Maybe I can't post a picture of it! Admin, could I?
Yes, we'll post a picture of it as long as there's no person in the photo. I look forward to seeing it. I made a gingerbread train once (engine, freight car, and caboose) from a pattern in a magazine. It took ALL DAY and the kitchen was a mess, but it turned out great. When the Christmas season was over, we replaced the load of peppermint candy with valentine hearts and used it well into February. After than we did not eat the train . . . or save it for another year.
Admin
(December 18, 2016 - 6:40 pm)
*laughs* That sounds fun! I could never be patient enough to make something that good.
Although "train" reminds me of one Christmas many years ago when my little brother and I were making gingerbread houses, and I made mine. But my brother, who was pretty young, didn't want to follow the directions to make his. So he started out making a house, then took pieces of the gingerbread and stuck them in all the wrong places, mashed them together, poured candy on top, and icing all over. He stood back and declared it was a train being destroyed by a hurricane.
(December 19, 2016 - 10:32 am)
It's the candy and icing that matter the most anyway (right?)...
I made a gingerbread sewing machine once. :) My brother and I used to make gingerbread structures for our birthdays (I remember he made a piano once).
(December 19, 2016 - 1:58 pm)
That is so hilarious, Owlgirl! It sounds like what my little brother might do if he were left unattended with a gingerbread house kit!
(December 20, 2016 - 11:23 am)
Wow Owlgirl and Admin, those gingerbread creations are making my mouth water...
Well, ours sat out for at least two months, so we never ate it. It was hard and dry by the end of Valentine's month. Although it did look pretty!
Admin
(December 20, 2016 - 4:49 pm)
Cool, Leeli! Just something else that's sort of Christmasy- today, my dad, uncle, cousin, and I went to this store called Five Below, where everything is five dollars or less. My cousin's service dog, Jasper, was with us- and one thing you should know about him is that he LOVES tennis balls. We found a giant, basketball-sized tennis ball at the store and got it for him as a 'Christmas present'. Do you all get any gifts for your pets (other than gingerbread dog treats?)
(December 18, 2016 - 9:10 pm)
Thats so cool! I love Five Below! Yes, every year when we go Christmas shopping I try to get to Petsmart and search the Dog, Hamster, and Fish isles! This year, I will be (hopefully) doing that, as well as building a house for my hamsters made of Popsicle sticks! There is a video on YouTube telling you how. I built two gingerbread houses from a kit, one with my brother and grandmother, (but mostly just me XD) and one with my brother and aunt. Both of the turned out great, and both them gave me way too many oppurtunities to eat candy and icing, all of which I took. ;-) on the first one, there was a hole in the icing bag, so extra icing was spewing out whenever I squeezed the bag, thus ending up, one way or another, in my mouth. on the second one, we had the E-Z build tray upside down, and had to flip it while the gingerbread was drying, and then it was a bit lopsided, but we decided it would just be 'whimsical' and 'doctor Seuss-y'. Alas, that plan had some structural problems, and we had to rebuild it. But by then we had used most of our icing, so I made a batch of homemade buttercream. Admin, that train sounds so cool! I'll post a few pictures of out gingerbread houses.
(December 19, 2016 - 8:57 am)
Here is before the second one was built.
Nugget says pain! That might be his first word! No, building the gingerbread house was NOT a pain! It was fun!
(December 19, 2016 - 8:59 am)
I love your houses! My brother and I tryed to make one, and it was a total disaster. Part of the walls broke so it had to be shorter than we were planning, and I hadnt cut the gingerbread well the it didn'teven fit together.
By the way, bread in french is pain. Maybe Nugget was just talking in french.
(December 19, 2016 - 11:44 am)