Wednesday, December 23rd - a christmas like no other

Well, it certainly has been a challenging year for absolutely everyone. Unfortunately we still have some hurdles to overcome. Starting at midnight on Christmas night, we are going back into a province wide lockdown - again. That means our store will be closed until near the end of January. Not to worry, I can find lots of things to do with my spare time.

Because a single person is allowed to join one family for the day, the family will still be coming here. I'm looking forward to that. My plan is to attempt something James has mentioned in the past - a Turducken. I have the three birds thawing as we speak. I will post photos after the day, assuming they are photo worthy. Or of course they could be a tutorial in how NOT to do it! Time will tell. 

Yesterday was James' 20th birthday! Congratulations James. I was invited to join the family for supper and what a feast it was. Escargot, grilled steak, crablegs, , etc, etc. It was truly wonderful. 

I volunteered to bake the birthday cake. I had good intentions and some research gave me ideas but it didn't quite work out as planned. However, I did learn a thing or two along the way so all was not lost.

The goal was to cut into the cake and have it appear like camouflage inside. I coloured some of the batter and dropped portions into the cake pans. In retrospect I should have done at least two things: colour all of the batter, not just some, so it would all be camo. and also do not swirl the colours together. It might have worked better had I not swished around a toothpick into the batters. In the end it looked more like flowers and leaves! Lessons learned.

Once they were baked and cooled, I wanted to inject a bit of a surprise. So two of the three layers had a hole cut into the middle. They were stacked and candies poured into the middle, before the third layer was placed on top.

My goal was to ice the cake camouflaged to look like a tree. It kind of worked, but it needed something on top. I was able to find a Christmas decoration that lit up, that sort of looked like a tree. It had lights but no leaves, so I glued some from a garland I was able to find at the same time. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention!

 In the end it kind of worked and they were pretty happy when the candies poured out of the middle when it was cut!

  

So all in all it actually went quite well. Again, Happy Birthday James.

It's been a busy few days leading up to Christmas. James got home on Friday and he came out to have lunch with me on Sunday. I invited our next door neighbours to join us and they really enjoyed chatting.

It was very nice to spend some quality time with James. 

Then Monday was lunch at Nancy's. Marla and Linda joined us and I was overwhelmed by the caring and generosity of these ladies. Everyone has been so kind to me and I'm so grateful to be in such a good place. Even a special delivery from the East Coast with not one, but two kinds of fruitcake and a special island publication, made this a very special week. Certainly a different Christmas from last year. In spite of Covid I'm feeling very blessed this year. 

So Merry Christmas to you all who read this (okay all 5 of you!) See you after Christmas and stay safe everyone.

One last thing: a friend posted this on facebook and it totally sums us this year. Thanks Jan.