Merry Christmas! Sugar High!

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

~Charles Dickens

Christmas Cookie making! Baked, iced and fretted over by me!

This Christmas is slightly bitter sweet for me. Although I'm home with my parents after spending many years abroad, my sister is not here and it's hard to forget that there is a family member missing in all things that we do.

Family secret: My Dad and sister are Christmas Nazis. The tree must be perfect! The lights must be perfect! The christmas balls must not be near another of it's colour and I swear when my mother and I aren't looking they are on their hands and knees measuring the distance between the lights with Christmas rulers. If you don't believe me, Let me let you in on a Mehrer tradition- get a tree, set it up and walk around it 360 degrees. cut branches out of crowded areas, and drill new holes and insert said branches into the blank areas. And once the tree is full of decorations, you must have one person stand on the street and use hand signals to tell the other to fix the bits of the tree that might not look perfect to people walking by. So taking on the Christmas traditions was a daunting task that's been passed on to me this year.

Blinded by the light of Christmas.

Luckily, I passed tree decorating with flying colours, literally. In fact, after I had arranged the lights we had, with dad's blessing, I went to town in the truck and bought 300 more blinking mini lights. Our tree would blind regular Las Vegas Gamblers! My mother, of course, is wondering how much electricity we are spending with our stupendously blingy tree, so dad told her to go out and check the electricity metre. "It's probably whizzing so fast you could use it as a fan if you get too hot!" he said.

Gotta love my Dad.

Christmas cookie plate! How Festive!

Anyway, the next daunting task was baking. My sister is the baker in the family. She is also the decorator. I have piped cookies with her before, but under stern direction. so here you are Rene, not only did I bake these cookies, but I iced them myself! And it took me hours. Now I feel like a little Christmas elf sweat factory worker. but if you'd seen the cookies my sister made last year, where the guests refused to eat them, but rather wrapped them up in little napkins to take home and admire, you know I had lots to live up to. So here they are!

(And yes, Nae, you were greatly missed during the piping of these cookies. And the tree decorating. And all that will come in the next week to come! And FYI, there is no WAY I am going to make a gingerbread house!)

I kind of got into the snow flakes. They were really hard to screw up, so we have a plethora of them in many shapes and sizes.

These ones weren't easy to arrange on the baking pan, so they are slightly skewed. But as my art teacher once said,"never strive to make anything perfect otherwise you erase the idea that it was handmade." I agree! (Design of the two nicer looking cookies stolen from Rene's cookies from last year.)

Wonky Who trees. (I love Grinchy green!)

Cookies of the bells.

Snowflake Christmas tree!

Shockingly, there is still icing left over! What to do with all that icing?

Dad says make more cookies!!!

Merry Christmas!

xxMelanie