Frosting or Sprinkles?

Jess: I knew it was time for us to write another blog, and we've decided to continue to talk about Advent, but I had no idea what to write about. After being asked 6 or 7 times, Wes finally picked Christmas cookies. So here we are.

My family always made a big deal about Christmas cookies. With Dad being a pastor, I think we focused more on Advent than some other families, so we didn't make cookies until it was almost Christmastime. For us, Advent was also a time of preparation for my Grandma coming to visit for two weeks or so, and we never did anything Christmas-specific until she arrived, usually a day or two before Josiah and I went on break from school. So there we were, somewhere around December 20, with no Christmas decorations, tree, or cookies. Yet we had usually bought all of our presents.

Then Grandma would arrive and the real excitement would begin. We spent most of a day decorating. We'd put up the tree, which was an adventure in itself. We made room in the family room for it, often making the whole room kind of inconvenient for those weeks; then we'd find all of the various pieces of the tree. We had one of those where you had to connect each individual branch to the pole in the center of the tree. Next, we'd spend what seemed like hours un-knotting the lights we had so carefully stored the year before (got a little knot here). Finally, we would be allowed to decorate per my mother's sometimes crazy instructions: "Icicles have to hang straight," "You can't have two of the same kind of ornament too close together," "Make sure you're using the inside of the branches, too," "Did you put anything at the back of the tree?" It was usually at this point where my dad would give up and go to his office. Josiah and I always fought over who got to hang which ornament while my mom and grandma tried to unpack fast enough for us to hang them. Things looked grim...then all of a sudden we would step back and our tree would be beautiful, messy, wonderful, and crazy--just like the process.

In the next day or two after the tree-lighting fiasco, we would go through the Christmas cookie disaster of (insert year here). Mom and Grandma made the dough while Josiah and I watched TV. When they had a cookie sheet full, they would call us in to decorate. We had yellow, red, green sprinkles and multicolored sprinkles, silver balls, and cinnamon candies (I'm pretty sure we had the same bottles of them for most of my life). Mom would very carefully cut out two trees, two snowmen, two Texases, two angels, etc. for each tray. Then Jo and I would decorate them--hopefully without fighting over which bell belonged to whom. The cookies went in the oven and we went back to the TV to start the process again. This went on for ages until the last tray, which was always just four round pieces of dough that we could decorate with as much sugar as we wanted. I don't quite remember what happened after we ate those...

That day or the next, we would also make mints. They're basically just powdered sugar, water, mint extract and food coloring, but I thought they were fantastic. We had to set them out to dry for a day or so before Christmas. Grandma and I usually rolled them out and set them in the dining room, which was a prime spot to run in and grab one without anyone noticing. Somehow, there were always missing mints by Christmas day...

This year, Wes, Tomas, Katherine and I put up the Christmas tree on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. There was no fighting, but I definitely caught myself trying to tell Kat to make sure she didn't put too many of the same ornament too close together. Wes and I will be making cookies and mints, and there's a pretty good chance that he'll be watching TV or playing his XBox while I carefully cut out two of each shape. We'll be decorating with icing AND sprinkles, to combine our family traditions into one. I don't know if it will be the same without the fighting, though...

Wes:
So, as far as Christmas traditions of decorating the tree or making Christmas cookies, my family had, well, none. We just did whatever seemed good at the moment. We kinda all decided together when to put the tree up, and usually that was accompanied by a chorus of groans from each member of the family when we remembered how much work it took to put our Christmas tree up. We had a lot of fun putting the ornaments on it, but it seemed like every year we managed to loose either a number of ornaments or a branch from the tree. I'm still not really sure how this happened, seeing as how everything went back into the same box each year and no one ever got into them except for Christmas decorating. Weird...

But I will say that, when given the choice, I always did love me some frosting decorated cookies. You see, I'm not really a big cake person because I don't like a lot of frosting on things. If it's too sweet, I'll probably just give it to Jess or eat everything but the frosting. But for some reason, I love frosting on Christmas cookies. They are wonderful. So this whole just-put-sprinkles-on-them-and-call-it-quits thing is just not going to fly. I'm the king of this castle, and we're going to do things my way. (If I ask Jess nicely enough, that is). So yeah. Frosting. Way better than sprinkles.

Right now, and for the next week, my life is being consumed by papers for seminary. I am not a fan of having to write a paper that literally determines 100% of my grade and have to do it at the end of the semester. I probably should have taken this class pass-fail, but then we would all know what would be happening: I would not have anything going for me, because then I would just say that it was pass fail and didn't matter and would only apply myself for a "passing" grade, and I should definitely be striving for better than that.

I am also preaching at the Christmas tree lighting at Crosswicks' town hall tomorrow. A fun "sermonette" on Advent and Christmas as seen through the song/movie of the Little Drummer Boy! I was told multiple times to view this as a sermonette and not as a sermon--the difference being duration. A sermon is apparently supposed to be between 12 and 18 minutes (yeah, right, Ryan Barnett!) and a sermonette between 5 and 10. Well, I think I'm in that time limit, but as my friends and loved ones will tell you, I've apparently been known to be long-winded! We'll see, though, come tomorrow, if I have mastered the sermonette.

Well, that is all for now! Tune in next week for a lively discussion on the pros and cons of candy canes!

You stay classy, World Wide Web!

-jess and wes