Chirstmas Eve

I cannot believe it has been another month since posting...and that it is Christmas Eve already!!! What have I been doing you ask? Well I have been busily trying to get myself organized and ready for teaching next semester so that I can relax for a couple of days and finish off the first chapter of my PhD thesis! When not working I have been busily preparing the house for our Christmas at home. We typically go to Mexico or Ontario, but this year we decided to have a Halifax Christmas. So I got some pine and cedar branches, and large pine cones for some festive decorating.
I really wanted to keep this Christmas as low impact as possible. So we used our Norfolk Pine houseplant as our tree. I finally got around to decorating our Charlie Brown Christmas Tree!
Do you see the resemblance?
Our Norfolk Pine is only about 60 cm tall (with the pot!). I was afraid to put more than the felted snowman, santa and candy canes for fear that it would break in half. It is leaning sadly over just like the one above...but it is better than no tree!

To keep with the sustainable theme, I made all of my gifts. This was a labour of love and took a lot of my evenings and weekends to get them all ready for giving. I made 200 peanut butter balls, 3 dozen molasses cookies and a batch of my memere's (endearing word for grandma in french) sucre a creme (or fudge in english).
Here they are after their chocolate bath!
I couldn't resist a molasses cookie...
I also made my own honey sweetened apple sauce with the apples we picked in the fall.
I also made some cute labels for my creations...I also made an orange scented body lotion using this recipe on Healthy Living with a Twist and a revitalizing (peppermint scent) sugar body scrub using EcoYogini's recipe.
Last but not least are little aloe plants I received from a friend and decided to share in little "pots" purchased at Value Village, a second hand store.
I also wanted to make Christmas as traditional as possible...well actually a melding of 3 cultural traditions...French Canadian (my mom's side), English Canadian (my dad's side) and Mexican. What better way to do that than through food...
Here I am making tourtiere, a french Canadian meat pie...
The finished product! We will likely eat these on New Year's eve. Last night we ate Mole Poblano (chicken with a spicy chocolate gravy) with homemade corn tortillas. I made it in my new enamel cast iron dutch oven! Thanks Mom!!
Typically, mole poblano at Christmas time is eaten in a dish called Romeritos. This is a typical dish from Mexico city that has dried shrimp and a plant that is called romerito and resembles rosemary. I am not a fan of shrimp and romerito is hard to come by in Halifax, so we went with chicken.

Tomorrow, we will have turkey with all the trimmings! I have been busy but promise to keep up over the holidays!

Merry Christmas everyone! May your holidays be filled with the warmth of family and friends!

Love,
Alli