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| Eggnog, cranberry cookies, and other festive goodies |
Despite having two North Americans with me, the eggnog ended up with a slightly clumpier texture than the recipe, which we found on the Nigella Lawson website, suggested. It still tasted good, though, if a little alcoholic for barely 1 pm on a Saturday. We settled down with this, some of my cookies and some popcorn to watch Christmas movie number one, National Lampoon's Winter Holiday, which was entertaining enough.
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| My cookie decorating efforts |
Then it was time to ice the gingerbread cookies one of my friends had baked, while movie number two, A Christmas Story played in the background. As with most things art-and-design, I always feel like I have good ideas, but don't have the technical abilities to carry them off very well. I still remember the one negative comment on my year two (age seven) school report: "She colours neatly but needs to experiment with bolder strokes." This is evidenced perfectly in my contribution to the decorated cookies.
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| Everyone's decorated gingerbread cookies |
When we put on Home Alone (the only film on the list that I'd seen before), the others moved on to mulled wine and I whipped up a batch of hazelnut hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows. By the time it got to 7 pm, we realised we were finally sick of eating cookies and sweet drinks, and ran out to get a kebab, before sitting down to watch movie number four, Nativity!, which I actually quite enjoyed. I hadn't heard of it until Mark Kermode recently reviewed the (less impressive) sequel. By 11 pm, I had had nearly twelve hours of non-stop Christmas and it was finally time to go home.
I do now have a very tiny (but real) Christmas tree in my living room and a festive candle in my kitchen, so something must have stuck. It's probably a good thing I have two more weeks before the festive overdose that will be Christmas in New York.
