Baby's First Christmas

Pecan Lace Cookies

Gingerbread with lemon icing

Peanut butter chocolate "DeeDee balls"

Boxing Day breakfast

borrowing Jordan's hat

Love sandwich

Talk about your free range chickens.

Lily with "Santa"

Lily and Papa

Christmas walk

Christmas Night 

One of the MANY close crib games

Wrapped gift for hubs

Family recipe book

It was Lily's first Christmas and as with most children's first Christmases, she didn't know what was going on. She did enjoy all of the company, music and general jolly feeling around the house. I'll start at the top with one of my favourite parts about Christmas; the food. Dan and I were determined to bake everything this year, we spread it out over the week before Christmas and we ended up with a nice variety of goodies. Here's the list; pecan lace cookies, gingerbread trees with lemon icing, peanut butter chocolate balls, white chocolate macadamia nut cookies, sugar and spice candied nuts, almond bark, and eggnog cheese cake bars. Don't worry, we didn't eat it all ourselves, we had about 25 family members over the course of 4 days to help us, although we did eat way too much and we are now on an extended salad binge. We had a lovely sushi dinner with a local tuna for Christmas Eve dinner, a traditional Swiss fondue for Christmas Day and a big turkey dinner with the whole extended family for Boxing Day. Christmas morning was really low key, we did homemade secret santa gifts so there was just one small handmade or vintage find gift for each person. I made Dan a family recipe book with recipes from our grandparents, our parents and our own family favourites and a homemade card with our favourite holiday sentiment "Creamy Hollandaise!".  Lily got two new wooden toys from us: a ball dropper and a shape sorter, a ride on bug from her Nana and Papa, a down quilt from her Grandma and a set of vintage chairs from her aunt and uncle. We went for a lovely winter walk in the sunshine and got some pictures of Lily with "Santa" in their matching jackets (thanks auntie JoJo!). We played lots of cribbage and Cranium over the course of the holidays and spent quiet, quality time with family. Overall it was the perfect quiet and thoughtful Christmas that we intended.

Apple Picking

Nothing better than a fresh picked apple

Lily loved them too!

Just one of the three huge bushels of apples we picked.

This post is a little late but a few weeks ago we went apple picking. Our original plan was to go out to a farm and pick apples and pay for whatever we picked, then I started noticing apples everywhere I looked. Every other neighbour had a tree full of apples! I put the word out that we were looking to come and pick apples and luckily our friends parents had a tree ripe for the picking. We packed up our baskets and a ladder and honestly within twenty minutes of picking apples we had three baskets overflowing with ripe organic apples, yet the tree looked like it hadn't even been touched. These were seriously the best apples I have ever tasted in my life. AH-mazing! We made applesauce, apple pie, apple muffins and cut and froze a ton of apples for the winter. I wish I knew how to can otherwise I would have canned a ton of readymade apple pie filling, maybe next year. A huge thank you to Elliot's parents for letting us pick their apples. How amazing that you can grow organic apples on a tree in your yard for many to enjoy for years. We will definitely be planting an apple tree if we ever when we buy a house of our own. When I think of fall I always think of apples, you?