Thursday, December 15, 2005

Getting the Tree & Seeing the Family

Last Friday night, J & I had dinner at The Olive Garden. It was great, surprisingly. Not that the Olive Garden is bad, it's just not usually so good. J had 4-cheese penne & I had some kind of balsamic-drizzled beef tenderloin with fettucine in gorgonzola cream sauce. Then, we went right home to bed.

Saturday, we had lunch at The Winds. We split a wonderful pear-based salad with blue cheese crumbles. J had the organic sandwich, packed with cheese & veggies, while I had Christmas lima beans stewed with veggies & served over rice with a wedge of cabbage & a smattering of blue cheese crumbles. They call it "Blue Christmas" & it's divine.

After lunch, we went out to the school forest festival & had a little boy (well, a high school freshman) cut our tree down for us. It was so much fun to tromp through the snowy woods looking for just the perfect tree. I get extra punches on my butch card because I got the tree to the car & loaded nearly all by myself. J did do some tugging from the other end to get it more securely into the trunk. I love having fold-down seats!

We just had a little time before we had to head out for the UCC church, so we changed from our lumberjack clothes into bling, in preparation for Rosemary & Brent's pre-wedding cocktail party. I was the liturgist for the church service & had fun doing that. Then, we headed over to Brent's folks' extremely swanky neighborhood of winding streets & gigantic houses. The party turned out to be not so swanky, which was very nice. Despite the large amount of money (both Brent's parents are surgeons & the party was basically to show Rosemary & the baby off to their friends), the people were not at all pretentious or snotty. We had a good time, especially chatting with Rosemary's parents & playing with the bambino boy.

However, since the food was light rather than heavy appetizers, we grabbed dinner (well, breakfast for me) at Frisch's on the way home. J was up & down all night cooking a turkey & a ham for her family Christmas get-together. We stopped at Borders for coffees & a tide-over snack on the way down to Hamilton. We had a nice visit with J's family, but had to leave before they started eating so that we could greet the boys when they got home. I quick whipped up some artichoke dip & we took that as our contribution to Christmas Family Night at the Presbyterian church. We munched & visited with our former pastor's wife & little boy, as well as Brendan & Laura. They brought a gorgeous pannettone for their contribution. I am not entirely sure the congregation knew what to make of it. This is the sort of carry-in dinner where there are generally at least 3 buckets of KFC. Our Sunday school class did a skit & also J & I told some childhood memories of Christmas. Then, we headed home & I worked on Hebrew while the kids went to bed & J read Artemis Fowl.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

ok moonie-moo-na (I had a cousin who was called that, don't ask me why ...) how was your Christmas? What was dinner? Did you have fun? Why should I remain a Presbyterian????

Hope you're well.