That evening, we continued our celebration of the return of the light with still more food and a surprising amount of alcohol. I made stuffed meatloaf which is even more fantastic than it sounds. You take ground beef and ground pork, mix it up with some Parmesan Reggiano and bread crumbs, then you roll it out, throw on some carrots, spinach, semi soft cheese of your liking and (to keep with a theme) prosciutto, roll it up like a jellyroll, pour on some olive oil and cook that bad boy for an hour or so. Also, I made an escarole salad. For dessert - lemon cream sandwich cookies. Then, because they would not be with us for Christmas, we exchanged gifts with Chris and Sonya. The girls opened their shared Solstice gift and Kate declared that she didn't want to watch porn.
After that round of guests departed with many hugs and well wishes and some of the remaining lemon cream sandwich cookies and after some cleaning and laundry, my parents arrived. Next up - Christmas Eve dinner with the Capes (Joy's family). Joy made appetisers and two fantastic soups and I made several breads, more cookies (more lemon, the double chocolate from Baking With Julia and ginger cookies that always taste like more). The girls opened gifts from Joy's parents, Charles and Lenora, and Sarah ran screaming and crying from Charles whenever he got too close. Oh, and I made my dad make the eggnog, which was delicious.
Kate and Sarah doled out some more chunks of the chocolate cookie dough so that Santa could have fresh cookies that night. I put those in the oven and while they baked, we went and threw the reindeer food Joy brought for the kids out on the front steps to entice 8 tiny reindeer. Then we had a torrential downpour, which turned the reindeer food to disgusting mush, but no one noticed it until late Christmas day.
At the impressively decent hour of 7:30AM Kate entered our room eyes sparkling, grin ear to ear, and said "Mommy, Daddy Santa ate ALL the cookies!" and with that, my Christmas was already made.
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