Simply Festive

I’m trying to simplify this year. With my youngest child being a middle schooler, that automatically simplifies the whole Christmas thing. Santa finds prepping gifts for teens and adults a lot less complicated, although it is generally more expensive. I’ve also tried to simplify the many activities I have planned in the past as well as my cooking and baking plans. I still made our top favorite cookies, but I won’t be making six extra kinds on top of those. We purchased small things for a modest number of neighbor gifts instead of giving something hand made to nearly the entire neighborhood. We haven’t planned a ton of outings, and I didn’t even make a new Christmas tree ornament this year (although we did have half a dozen collected on our travels throughout this year.) Pretty much, I took what is most important to us and have ditched the rest.

Having said that, I can’t just eliminate the fun food aspect of the holiday season because I love fun food! However, I did take things down a notch by using canned crescent rolls instead of homemade bread dough to make our pigs-in-a-blanket wreath. And since Malia has decided that she likes loves asparagus now, there were plenty of options suitable for our simple veggie tree. 

The ironic thing is that Malia was actually not here for dinner this evening. I plan my menus a week at a time and frequently plan special meals even further in advance than that, so this meal has been on the docket for a while now. I chose this evening based on the fact that Matthew was actually here for dinner, which has been a rare occurrence of late. Malia received a somewhat last-minute invite to accompany a friend to the aquarium and have pizza for dinner afterward, so she was unexpectedly away for our festive supper. When I shared a picture of our fun food in our family group chat, this was her response:

So goes growing up. You aren’t always here for Mom’s fun stuff even though I try my best to plan around the kiddos’ schedules. Luckily for her, there are plenty of ingredients left to make more pigs for a later meal.