My Holiday Decorations

I’m a nester. The aesthetics of my living space are very important to my happiness and well-being. Whenever I move into a new space, I am unable to sleep until I have arranged the furniture in the optimal configuration, and have all of my lamps/rugs/pictures in the right place. Yeah, this is weird, I know. But, being a nester also means I love holiday decorations! And, with a little help from my mom, I’ve got great ones.

I LOVE window clings. One year my mom bought me a set that remains unparalled in its awesomeness. It was a Christmas tree, with individual ornaments, a star, and presents. Fantastic! After hearing me reminisce about that cling for the umpteenth time, my mom surprised me with these sweet clings. Now Santa and Frosty are hanging out in my room!

Stocking (and crucifix).

Mom also bought me this great stocking from Old Navy. I love it! There are deer, birds, and a Christmas tree made out of the deers’ antlers. Sweet!

I got Christmas lights at Home Depot to complete my decorations. I put a strand around the outside so I could see them with the blinds closed, and a strand around the inside so they could be seen from outside with the blinds closed. Covering all my bases!

It looks pretty festive at night, if I do say so myself!

You can kind of see the stocking from outside, too!

Mosaic Christmas Party

Our Face-to-Face group at Mosaic had its Christmas party on Saturday night. I love my pastor’s family’s tree – it’s packed with ornaments, and each one has a story.

It reminded me of our tree at home, with so many unique ornaments. Here are two of my favorites:

Cute little koala bear. It has a jingle bell in its tummy!

Pat the Bunny!

We each brought a treat and a gift to exchange.

Jane picking from the pile of gifts.

I forgot about the gift exchange until thirty minutes before the party, which meant I showed up with two Glade candles from Giant. Fancy, huh? But I had a nice gift bag to put them in. My friend Michelle  went the opposite route – she brought good gifts, but wrapped them in a trash bag!

Fancy wrapping!

The gift exchange was fun, although my gift was picked exactly last. The gift I received was a Jupiter Jack, which is supposed to make your speaker phone transmit through your radio. It hasn’t worked so far, though, but it was a cool idea.  Everyone had fun stealing gifts from each other, and joking about the gifts they got/gave.

After the gift exchange some of us played Scattergories. I love Scattergories! I won this game, which was pretty sweet! Then we played Apples to Apples. I didn’t win, but I tied for second, which was okay.

I love hanging out with the people from Mosaic. We always have a great time. Although my pastor is pretty competitive, so the board games can get a little heated. It’s all in good fun, though!

Gift Wrapping at Mosaic

Yesterday morning the Mosaic Women’s Initiative held a gift wrapping party. Our church has been donating presents to give to the children nof Burmese refugees, and we wrapped those presents together. I overslept and came late, so I only got to wrap one present, but it was a good time.

Gift wrapping set-up in the back of the sanctuary.

Close-up of wrapping action.

Here’s a shot of our church’s “Chrismon” tree. The ornaments are called “Chrismons,” and they were made by kids (and some adults) in our congregation. They are symbols representing aspects of Jesus’s life or charcter. I’d never heard of them before this year, but I think they’re pretty cool.

Our church's Christmas tree.

I love Christmastime. Or Chrismontime, I guess!

Centro Maria Christmas Party

Friday night we had our Christmas party here at Mosaic. I helped decorate again – mostly wrapping garlands around columns. I had a really good time. We gathered first in the basement hall for chips and salsa, some cheese pizza, and lemonade.We played some holiday games (including one where there are pictures representing carols, and you have to guess which carol goes with which picture – that was really fun!). Apparently there was also a Secret Santa, which I didn’t know about until yesterday, so the people who participated exchanged their gifts. One of the young women told us about the symbolism behind the 12 Days of Christmas, which was really interesting. Then we headed upstairs for dinner in our beautifully-decorated dining room. It was a pretty great celebration, and I had fun talking and laughing with my housemates, and meeting some for the first time!

The basement hall, decorated for Christmas! Nobody sat in that circle, though.

We all sat over here, on the couches.

The snack spread

Bad picture of the dining room decked out for Christmas. I decorated that tree in the back all by myself!

FINISHED!

It’s official – I’m finished with my first semester of graduate school!

I had my Economics final tonight, and I think it went pretty well. At any rate, I’ve made it through a semester of graduate school, and they didn’t kick me out for being too dumb, and the other students didn’t laugh at me, and I didn’t embarrass myself. Success!

Peanut Blossom Cookies

I’m entering a giveaway for a Kitchen-Aid Stand Mixer hosted by Brown-eyed Baker, and that’s why I’m going to share my favorite holiday recipe – peanut blossoms!

Peanut Blossom cookies are really yummy, especially when they’re still warm and the chocolate is all melty. Mmmmm. I’m planning on baking some for Mosaic’s Christmas party this Saturday, if I can get some oven time somewhere. Anyway, here’s the recipe:

Peanut Blossoms
Ingredients
•    1 ¾ c flour
•    ½ c regular butter
•    ½ c peanut butter
•    ½ c brown sugar
•    ½ c white sugar
•    unwrapped Hershey’s kisses
•    colored sugar

Instructions

1. Mix flour, peanut butter, brown and white sugars, regular butter
2. Roll into small balls
3. Put colored sugar in a bowl, then roll dough-balls in the sugar
4. Cook for six to seven minutes
5. Take cookies out of the oven, place one kiss on each cookie
6. Put back in the oven for one more minute, then take out and eat while warm!

In our family, we traditionally make peanut blossoms around Christmas and use red and green colored sugar. You can easily make them appropriate for any holiday by changing the color of the sugar – we’ve done purple, pink, yellow, and blue for Easter before. You could do red and white for Valentine’s Day, orange and red for Thanksgiving, orange and purple for Halloween, even green for St. Patrick’s Day. And they’ll be just as delicious no matter when you make them!

Thanksgiving 2009

Yeah, this is a little late, but it’s still before Christmas, right? Yes! So here’s a post about how much fun I had during Thanksgiving!

A lot of my family was there – Aunt Becky and Uncle David, Aunt Mary and Uncle Keith, Aunt Tara and Uncle Brock, my grandma, my cousins Betsy, Aaron, Preston, Jessi, Hannah, Brock, Emily, Mara, Megan, Austin, and of course me, my mom and dad, and Leslie and Daniel. We took over a conference room at the hotel for Thanksgiving dinner:

Betsy’s kids Megan and Austin made this awesome banner:

Pretty sweet, right?

After dinner we played a family trivia game. My mom brought these clickers and software she uses at work, so we made a Powerpoint program with the questions, and everyone entered their answers with their clickers. It was fun!

Trivia game action shot!

On Black Friday we went downtown on the Metra. We practiced the respected, age-old tradition of craning our necks every 20 seconds to see if the train was coming yet.

We also posed for pictures:

Cousins!

Aunties!

Then we hit the town. Watch out Chicago – a big group of slightly-crazy and definitely loud Merchants are coming around!

We headed right over to the Water Tower to eat at Wow Bao, then we wandered around shopping for hours. Eventually we went to Macy’s, which used to be Marshall Fields. It’s really really a shame that they didn’t just continue calling it Marshall Fields, and changed it to Macy’s (which is not special and local) – but that’s the topic of another post. The Macy’s has like eight floors, and we always ride the escalators.

There are cousins and Aunties down there!

The Macy’s is decorated to the hilt for Christmas. It’s beautiful.

Giant ornaments on the main floor

Christmas tree outside the Walnut Room, the fancy restaurant inside Macy's.

Uncle Mistletoe - a beloved Holiday character I'm grateful to have never heard of before.

Outside Macy's

After Macy’s we hotfooted it to Ogilvie Transportation Center to catch the train back to the suburbs.

That's some serious popcorn Leslie's eating.

Cheese and caramel popcorn mixed – a very dangerous combination. Garrett’s Popcorn – also a Chicago tradition.

That's some serious loot! Including a gift bag from More cupcakes - look for a post on that soon!

Thanksgiving was great. I love getting together with my family. We may be large, we may be loud, we may be rowdy, we may be a restaurant’s worst nightmare, but we really love each other. And that’s what counts.

Giant Food

The grocery store I frequent is called Giant Food. When I mentioned going there, my mom made a joke about how it only sells food that is giant. This made me laugh for a very long time, even though typing it out makes it seem not that funny. Just trust me, it was funny.

On Black Friday I went to the Hershey store in downtown Chicago, where I saw this:

That’s right – my mom’s favorite candy, in giant form! Reese’s peanut butter cups as big as your hand! A full 8 ounces of peanut butter cup! No one would buy them for me, since they were $15, but I’m hoping to get one in my stocking. Even though I probably would never eat them, and they’d just sit in my room for years – seems worth it to me!

The Hershey store had a lot of giant stuff. There was the giant chocolate syrup bottle bank, a giant Hershey kiss, and of course the huge Hershey bars. You could begin quite the collection of giant food!

Snow!

I woke up this morning to snow! We’re forecast to get 1-3 inches of snow today, but so far it’s not sticking to the roads so they’re in good shape. It’s just piling up on lawns and trees and cars! I wish I could post some good pictures, but I left my camera charger at home over Thanksgiving and it’s still in the mail. So I’ll have to make do with camera phone pictures.

Snow seen through my window. Check out my Christmas lights! I'll post about those later.

My car. Do you think my car missed snow after being in Nashville a few winters, or is it thinking, "Oh crap, not this stuff again!" I know which one I'm thinking.

I read today that it has snowed on December 5th in five of the last seven years. I also read a lot of posts about the snow forecast. Alert DC has now sent me five emails about it, all the major DC blogs I read have posted about it, and the WaPo’s transportation blog has posted several warnings, along with tips for how to drive around without dying. All of this fuss made me seriously overestimate the mayhem that might occur today. I know 1-3 inches is not that much, but maybe DC is totally lacking in the infrastructure necessary to handle even such a small snowfall? What if the DC drivers lose their minds and have no idea how to drive in snow? What if the roads are covered and there are no salt trucks for a couple days? In short – what if DC handles snow like Nashville, instead of like Chicago?

So, I freaked out a little. I have to admit, I was one of the ones at Giant last night, loading up on food. Although, instead of a cartload of groceries, six gallons of milk, five loaves of bread, and thirty cans of food, stocking up for me meant two frozen dinners, another half gallon of milk, and another box of Cocoa Pebbles. Oh, and some wintergreen Tic-Tacs as a treat.

Short side story: I was behind two people in line to check out. The woman who was checking out had a huge amount of stuff. AND she had to pay for it in three separate orders. AND she had like a thousand coupons. AND she was a slow mover. Seriously, it was unbelievable how long it took for her to check out. She was mostly done when I got in line, and I must have stood there for fifteen minutes! And then the woman who was next had a big order as well, but I was STILL in my car leaving before the first woman put her cart in the cart corral! What the heck, lady?

Anyway, after getting groceries I filled up my tank with gas. I also decided not to go to a tea thrown by a woman at Mosaic, since it was at noon which was when the snow was supposed to start. And I did not want to get stuck out with a spare tire if the roads went bad! So I came back to Centro Maria ready to hunker down and feeling pretty prepared for anything DC weather could throw at me. And then when I woke up and saw that the snow wasn’t sticking to the roads, I realized I should have trusted my instincts that it was going to be no big deal. I lived in Chicagoland for three years, for goodness’ sake! I can handle some wintry mix!

Cafe Asia

Monday night was the last class session for Introductory Japanese I at the Graduate School. After our final exam (which I feel pretty confident about), we all went to Cafe Asia for dinner. I love my Japanese class. We have so much fun together, laughing and joking, so I knew dinner would be a good time.

Cafe Asia is at 17th and I. It’s got dishes from several different Asian cuisines (Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai from what I saw), and it’s got a sort of modern design that was pretty cool.

All of us ordered Japanese dishes, except, ironically, our Japanese professor, who ordered pad thai. I had pork ramen, and it came in a huge bowl. There was enough for maybe three people! I kept finding new things in there. I’d poke around with my chopsticks, and find some fish cakes. Then I’d find some scallions. Then some noodles, then some pork, and then some white long things and some green leafy things. It was an adventure. Also, I ate the soup with chopsticks! I kind of had to, since my Japanese prof was right there. Eating noodles with chopsticks involves a lot of slurping, and it’s a little messy. I like spoons.

The server offered to pack up my leftovers, but I wasn’t too sure about how they would pack up soup (and how I’d have room to store it in the packed fridge on my floor!), so I declined. The ramen was pretty good, but next time I think I’ll try the chicken instead of the pork.

Those half-circles are fish cakes. They taste exactly like you'd think fish cakes would taste.

The other people in my group ordered yakisoba (wheat noodles and stuff), yaki udon (rice noodles and stuff), and tonkatsu (fried pork cutlets), and several people ordered some sushi. It all looked good! And we had a great time, although we missed Rae, who was packing to fly to Japan the next day. All of us have planned to take the next level Japanese class next semester, and I’m really hoping that it’s just the six of us again cause it’s been so much fun. Here’s a picture of us right before we eat (Valerie’s got her “thinking cap” on – I wish I’d brought one for the exam!):

I'm taking the picture, obviously. Note the giant ramen bowl.